


Data is King

by Amuly



Series: Data is King + Bonus Tracks [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Anal Sex, Bottom Steve, Class Differences, Class Issues, Cyberpunk, F/F, F/M, First Time, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Minor Character Death, Plotty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 03:31:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 136,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1251166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amuly/pseuds/Amuly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a cyberpunk dystopia, all the wealth is concentrated in New Versailles and the majority live in impoverished ghettos outside. Prosthetics are strictly prohibited, though many of the poor have body modifications to help them live. Steve Rogers is an idealistic young man who raids the storerooms of New Versailles with his best friend Bucky Barnes, to bring food and medicine to the poor. But when tragedy strikes, Steve is inspired by Dr. Erskine to go seek out the notorious slumlord/black market trader Tony Stark. Rumor has it that Tony used to be a member of New Versailles, but left to make his fortune off the backs of the working man... or was he kicked out? Although they don't hit it off at first, Steve and Tony must work together.</p><p>They have some help. The Three Fates are women who control information. Steve's friends from his old life are good people on the fringes of society because of their prosthetic enhancements. And there's Tony's network of resources and connections, not to mention his brilliant engineering mind that helped him build his empire.</p><p>But when Steve and Tony finally manage to put their differences aside and rise up against New Versailles... not everything is as simple as it seemed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Supremacy

 

The wind howled around the building face, stirring up the perpetual mist that surrounded the city, turning it into fierce eddies and crashing waves of vapor, but never dispersing it. Five hundred feet above the ground, two men clung to the smooth face of the skyscraper, two lone specks of discoloration stuck between the glowing white of the building and the wet grey of the mist.

Blonde hair, yellow-blonde like corn in a field, stood out like a shock over the painted white mask covering the first man's face. His clothes were long-sleeve robes covering his whole body, an off-white that contrasted like a discordant note against the blinding white face of the building. The paint on his mask was flaking off, revealing the original black leather it was made from beneath.

The man, Steve Rogers, leaned forward to tap at his companion's shoulder. Their hands were stuck to the building face with ultra-friction gloves, infused with thousands of micro-grip points. Their boots were made of the same material.

The other man, Bucky Barnes, looked over at Steve, peering through the murky plastic of his own mask, through the equally as murky plastic of Steve's mask. Steve gestured, thumb jerking up. Bucky nodded and fumbled at something inside his robes. After a moment he tugged a small, well-worn device out, painted white like their masks but chipping just the same. He glanced at it, then turned it around and stuck it out to Steve, pressing it against the plastic of Steve's mask so he could read it.

_524_ . 

Five hundred twenty-four feet. Five hundred and seventy-six feet to go. Say what you would about the privileged folk who lived inside the walls of New Versailles, but they sure liked their round numbers and organized symmetry. Made planning raids on the stores of food that much easier. Not that it was ever  _easy_ . 

Steve nodded his acknowledgement and Bucky shoved the altimeter back inside his robes, fumbling slightly. Steve shook his head, smiling behind his mask as they continued their climb. Bucky always did hate the loose robes they needed to wear to sneak into New Versailles' stores. But it was necessary if they were spotted while inside the storehouses, if they wanted to have a chance at looking like they belonged there.

Sweat dripped down Steve's back as he continued their climb, one had over the other, thighs propelling him upwards as his feet gripped at the walls. One foot, then the next, shoes designed with millions of little microscopic fingers by their ghetto's resident scientist, Doc Erskine. Every time Steve's foot found a grip that wasn't there, and his thigh and calf was able to push himself just another inch higher, Steve sent up a silent prayer of thanks to the good Doctor. Or perhaps it was a prayer down, not up, since those that lived in the towering skyscrapers of New Versailles had little regard for the denizens of the lower cities outside their shining white walls and protective mists.

Another four hundred feet, and Steve didn't need to check with Bucky as to their altitude: the end of the building, where the storeroom outer window was, drew close above their heads. Under another hundred feet or so and they'd be there. That was less than the distance that a sickly and small Steve had been able to wheeze down between the bases of the makeshift baseball field as a child. The neighborhood kids set it up, nestled in the garbage dump with old toilet seats for bases and defunct electronics cutting through the thin soles of their good-for-nothing shoes as they struggled to capture some innocence and fun.

Bucky got there first—Bucky always seemed to get everywhere first, Steve thought with a smile. The front of food lines, puberty, girls, finish lines: Bucky was always a step ahead of Steve. Which was alright by him: Steve was just happy to have Bucky with him, on the side of the good guys. He was Robin Hood and Steve was his Little John (only nowadays, the name was filled with the same irony it had been with the original Little John rather than being an apt description of his stature, all thanks to Doc Erskine and his scientific skill, once again).

Above Steve's head, barely visible through the thick mist, Bucky was fumbling with the security system on the window to the storeroom. Steve rested for a moment, hands and feet pressed as flat against the surface of the skyscraper as they could be, to give him a moment's rest. He watched Bucky with the ease and relaxation of having done this successfully dozens of times before with his best friend, confident with the knowledge that they knew how to do this, _Bucky_ knew how to do this, and that Bucky would get them in, same as he always did.

Sure enough, the window opened after a minute or two of Bucky fumbling with some wires, the faint click lost in the dampening pressure of the mist. He was gone in an instant, off-white robes sweeping soundlessly through the window, mist swirling and settling into the empty space his body left in an instant, erasing any evidence he had ever been there. Steve hauled himself up there a moment after, arms and legs strong and powerful as they propelled him through the window and gracefully onto the floor of the storeroom.

The window snapped shut behind him, closing out the poisonous mist. The air filter systems were already working in the storeroom, the last wisps of mist swept away in an instant by the magic of technology. Steve tugged off his mask and wiped at his face, sweaty with exertion and the cloying discomfort of being stuck behind that mask for the thousand foot vertical climb.

Bucky removed his mask too, dark brown hair sticking up every direction with the sweat that had formed in his hairline, handsome face dewey with the same liquid. He panted for a moment, breathing in the fresh, filtered air of New Versailles, before he turned to Steve and flashed him a smile.

“Ready to get to work?” Steve asked, still breathing a little heavy.

Bucky's grin turned cocky. “You know it.” The two men knocked their masks together in a sort of celebration, then set them aside at the window. If they were caught, they'd probably be recognized for who they were in an instant, but in the off chance that they _weren't_ , the masks would be a dead giveaway. Best to leave them by the window for when they'd need them again, and try and buy themselves some time. 

From beneath their robes, Bucky and Steve both set to work removing the packs they had brought with them. Tattered old canvas bags, painted in that same flecking white paint everything else was that they brought on these missions. Ignoring the paint chips he was spreading around the floor like some kind of reverse Christmas cheer, Steve opened up his bag and pulled a heavy canister out of it, along with a dozen white, deflated balloons. Bucky was pulling the same from under his robes.

Quickly Steve set to inflating the balloons with helium—a costly item, given its rarity and difficulty to come by, but less costly than the price of the goods Steve and Bucky brought back with them. Even if they lost money on the helium (which they did, actually, but when you give your spoils away for free, you don't tend to  _make_ money), it would still be worth it. Whatever helium cost, it was a small price to pay for food and medicine. 

Clunky fingers fumbled with the first little latex balloon, taking a few precious seconds too many to get the lip of it wrapped around the nozzle of the first helium tank. But then it was on, Steve's fingers pinching it carefully in place.

“Just like putting on a condom,” Bucky had told him the first time they did this, trying to help him out.

Steve had stared helplessly over at Bucky, big blue eyes still not quite grown into his head. “But I've never put on a condom before!”

Bucky had laughed himself sick, and Steve had been so scared they were going to get caught. But they weren't: they had gotten the supplies back. That had been the first of the good days: the days when Steve realized he had something to contribute, had something to do to help improve the lot of everyone around him.

Now the balloon inflated quickly under Steve's more practiced hand, and he tied off the end easily, trapping the helium inside. Another knot, this one to secure the balloon to the underside of the canvas bag he had just pulled it and the helium canisters out of. Then to repeat the process, two dozen times: pinch the balloon to the helium canister, fill it, tie it off, secure it beneath the canvas rucksack. Again and again Steve did this, time ticking down in the back of his head, ears attuned to any sounds coming from the far front of the room, a football field away, where the storeroom let out into whatever was beyond in this skyscraper in New Versailles. Steve had never seen more of the city than what was in this single room—it was all he needed to see, all he needed to know. A football field of food and medical supplies, hoarded away by the denizens of the city like scared children hoarding their sweets from others on the playground. Hoarded away from the people who needed it, from the greater population that filled the ghettos and world around the only city, outside the poisonous mist.

Steve filled dozens of balloons, until the six massive rucksacks he had brought with him were all floating to the ceiling. He tied off five and grabbed tight hold of one, carrying it with him around the storeroom as he began his grocery run. Bucky was already gone beside him, his five rucksacks tied off at the window already. They each had their grocery lists: they didn't need to stick together for this part of the raid. It was more efficient if they didn't.

Quickly Steve headed down the rows of supplies, the mountains and mountains of carefully organized, catalogued, and shelved goods that towered over his head. Steve's scowl deepened, as it always did when he roamed these halls. It was absurd, the amount of food that they kept locked up away from the needy, pleading hands of the masses. The injustice of it disgusted Steve. Some days he thought maybe there was something more he could do, something bigger than scratching at a scab, picking at this tiny mite on the asshole of the problems of the world. But he had yet to come up with something—something that would be  _useful_ , and not just vindictive and angry, a petulant child crying out in the night. 

Canned vegetables were first on Steve's list: things that wouldn't spoil, but contained much-needed vitamins that the people outside New Versailles so sorely needed. He filled up an entire canvas bag with just those: spinach and string beans and broccoli and carrots. The kids may not be the biggest fans of these, but Steve sure wished he had access to such vitamins when he was a kid. Maybe then he wouldn't have needed Erskine's unconventional intervention to help him grow out of the sickly kid he once was if he had access to these sorts of nutrients growing up.

After one canvas bag was filled, heavy but not as heavy as it would have been without the helium balloons to help alleviate some of the weight, Steve returned it to the window and grabbed a second canvas bag. Next to his bags, Steve noted that Bucky had already returned once to drop off his own full first bag—chock full of every kind of medicine Erskine had told them was needed for the people in the ghettos. Insulin and pain relievers, antibiotics and sterilizing alcohol, asthma controllers, stomach pills, epilepsy meds, and a thousand more things Steve had no knowledge of besides the grocery list Doc Erskine handed them every month as they went on these runs.

Next on Steve's list was fruits. Canned peaches, canned apples, canned cherries, canned tomatoes (Steve put it under the “fruits” grocery list because it had seeds. That meant it was a fruit... though then again, cucumbers had seeds too, didn't they?). Steve piled his canvas bag as full as it could get and still close part-of-the-ways, at the very least, then returned with it to the window. Bag three was grains: pastas and cereal, stuff that wouldn't get moldy too fast. Not that these supplies ever lasted more than a day or two, with the amount of people they tried to distribute them to. But just in case, in case one of these days they started to get ahead, to build up a surplus for the really bad times, Steve always bought supplies that would last, supplies that could be stored and not go bad.

Of course, this meant that Steve's choices for his fourth bag, dairy, was pretty limited. Powdered milk and powdered buttermilk. They had _some_ degree of refrigeration, down in the ghetto, but it was only the few who could build the systems themselves and find the freon which was as necessary as it was difficult to come by. Doc Erskine had one, because he needed it for some of his medicines. Anything Steve stole that needed to be refrigerated had to go to him. Which was why Steve only grabbed a dozen sticks of butter off the shelf, and three gallons of milk. He passed by the ice cream with scarcely a longing glance. He had made the mistake of trying it, once, on one of their first supply runs. He still felt guilty about that—just because he was the one making the runs didn't mean he deserved any more than anyone else got, down back home. And now he was stuck wanting to eat the darned treat every time he passed it on a run. Served him right.

By the time Steve returned with the final bag, Bucky was already at the window, mask on the top of his head and painted white ropes rigged as a torso harness to the canvas bags, not-quite-floating on their helium cushions. Bucky nodded at Steve, mask bobbing on the top of his head. “Get going, slowpoke,” he chastised, not unkindly. “I'm dying of old age, waiting for you.”

Steve snorted, but got to work pulling the ropes out from under his robes and hooking them onto the chest harness, then the canvas bags. The descent down was always nerve-wracking, at least for Steve. Bucky never seemed bothered by any part of it, cool cucumber that he was. The descent was also the most frustrating part for Steve: they were limited in how much they could bring by the strength in their backs and legs. If only there was some way to mechanize the return trip, somehow. A conveyor belt of ropes and pulleys. But the risk for detection would be too great: someone would have to stay at the bottom, where the sentinels patrolled regularly. And they would be too exposed, too visible, with streams of off-white canvas bags floating down the soaring walls of the skyscraper. They were lucky they hadn't been spotted before: such a system would drop their success rate down to zero, the first time they tried it. Of that, Steve was certain.

When he clipped the last bag into place, Steve turned to Bucky and gave him a thumbs up. “Ready to blow this popsicle stand?”

Bucky snorted and tugged his mask down over his face. Steve did the same. “You're such an old man.” Bucky's voice came out muffled and tinny through the mask, but definitely clear enough for Steve to understand him. Steve reached out and punched Bucky in the shoulder, none-too-lightly, and laughed when Bucky staggered back and clutched at his arm.

“Too big for you to pick on me now,” Steve reminded him, his own voice echoing weirdly in his ears, thanks to the mask.

“Hey, check your memory banks: I'm the one who protected your scrawny ass, not the one doing the picking-on,” Bucky reminded him.

Just as another witty retort was on the tip of Steve's tongue, a sound behind them, and a light cutting through the darkness of the room. Bucky and Steve fell silent in an instant, dropping down to their haunches beneath the windowsill. Someone had opened the door to the storeroom. Someone was coming in.

Steve turned his head sharply to look at Bucky, tugging up his mask so they could communicate quietly. Bucky did the same, eyes narrowed and calculating.

Steve glanced between Bucky and the open door of the storeroom quickly. _What do we do_?

Bucky glanced up there, then back at Steve. His body was very still as he raised a hand to his throat and pulled his thumb across his throat slowly.  _Kill whoever it is_ .

_No_ . Steve shook his head sharply.  _No_ . If they started killing the folks in New Versailles on these missions, not only would it put them in the moral wrong, but it would escalate tensions between the people of New Versailles and everybody who lived outside its gleaming white walls. At the very least, they'd never be able to make another run again; at the worst, they'd unwittingly start an all-out war. And the people of the ghettos were struggling to simply survive day by day. There was no question who would win that war.

Bucky shrugged, thinking again. He raised his hand, curled like around some object, then brought it down sharply.  _Knock him out_ ?

Steve shook his head again. Same problem: whenever the individual woke up, they would know someone had been there, and the raids would have to be suspended, not to mention the risk of retribution.

Bucky threw his hands up, head shaking angrily. He narrowed his eyes and Steve and his hand shot out, jabbing at the air in front of Steve.  _Well then what the hell do you want to do_ ?

Steve settled back on his heels, thinking quickly. The door was still open, the person rustling around at the front of the room. Steve held his hand out to Bucky in a placating gesture, pressing his palms down towards the floor.  _Wait. Wait_ . With any luck, whoever was at the front of the room was just collecting some supplies and would leave. The back of the room was almost never disturbed—Steve saw the same cans in the same places month after month, up until the two or three times a year when they restocked everything.

Bucky was shaking his head, fists clenched at his sides, but he stayed put. Steve waited patiently, eyes and ears trained on the front of the room, trying to discern what the citizen of New Versailles was doing, when they would be leaving. After about thirty seconds, with the person still rummaging around at the front of the room, Bucky gestured at Steve to get his attention. Steve glanced over reluctantly, ears still tuned anxiously to the front of the room. Bucky jerked his head over his shoulder, at the window. He raised his eyebrows.  _We could just jet, now_ .

Steve shook his head. That would alert the person in the room, more likely than not. Best to stay put. They would leave soon enough.

“Ghetto trash?”

Steve's body felt like it had been dumped in ice cold water. Next to him, Bucky went perfectly still, body rigid with shock.

“It's Bucky Barnes, yes?” the voice called out again. “And Steve Rogers?”

Steve knew that voice, from the New Versailles news broadcasts that occasionally filtered down to the rest of the populace. Baron Zemo.

Steve turned to Bucky. Very, very lowly, he whispered: “Jump.”

In one movement both men jumped to their feet, masks slapped down over their faces. Bucky kicked the window open, all security protocols out the window—coincidentally, the same place they were going. Bucky jumped first. Steve dove out after him.

The first five hundred feet of the building fell away behind them, as Steve scrambled to find his grip with gloves and shoes against the smooth face of the skyscraper. Bucky was a hundred feet below him, slowing his descent the same way Steve was trying to. Steve only caught a glimpse of him, off-white and tumbling below him, as he focused on his own attempts to stop his descent.

Wind whipped past Steve's robes, the weight of the canvas rucksacks, heavy with supplies, like an anchor pulling him to the depths of a white sea. It took everything in Steve not to scramble at the ropes, to try and release them. If he did, it would all be for nothing. And it wouldn't help slow his descent, not any amount that would be worth it. He kept his hands on the skyscraper, dragging the gloves along the smooth surface, trying like hell to gain some traction. It was working, albeit slowly. His feet dug into the edifice, shoes getting hot with friction. A hole ripped in his right glove, at the heel. Steve clenched his teeth and dragged his feet and hands harder, ignoring the skin he was losing to the building, the red blood that was marring the pure white surface.

He slowed, slowed, and finally came to a stop. Panting harshly into his mask, Steve glanced down. The mist was already settling back around him, making seeing more than a hundred feet in front of him almost impossible. Not to mention their white clothing and supplies camouflaging them, as was their purpose. Still, maybe seventy-five feet down and twenty feet over, Steve could  _just_ make out a darker blur, a figure in the white blankness. Steve let out a shaking breath, eyes stinging with relief. Bucky was okay. Bucky had managed to regain his traction, same as Steve. 

Carefully, Steve started climb down to Bucky, panting hard into his mask as his heart rate returned to something below scared jack rabbit, which was how it pretty much felt right now. As always, the descent was slow, painstaking, the weight of the supplies danging below him straining the grips on his gloves and shoes, now fresh with the added difficulty of those grips being worn nearly smooth in his frantic attempt to stop his mad descent.

Steve climbed down alongside Bucky maybe ten minutes later. He was clinging to the skyscraper face, staring up at Steve, white of his mask blank but somehow expressing anxiety. Steve immediately threw a hand out as he settled next to him, gripping tightly at Bucky's shoulder. Bucky's hand shot out at the same time, grabbing back at Steve's shoulder in reassurance. Carefully Steve leaned over, pressing his mask to Bucky's. 

“Fuck,” was Bucky's eloquent assessment of their situation.

“We gotta get these supplies down,” Steve said.

“If the guards aren't waiting for us,” Bucky pointed out.

The thought had already occurred to Steve. Futilely, Steve glanced down through the mist beneath their feet. He couldn't see through it to the bottom: no way to tell who was waiting down there for them, if anyone. Steve nodded chin over Bucky. “Altitude?” he asked aloud. Little point for quiet and subtlety now.

Maneuvering ropes and robes out of his way, Bucky fumbled one-handedly at the pockets past all those obstacles. After a moment his hand closed around something and he pulled out the little round altimeter, white paint worse for wear. He checked it for a moment, then turned it around and pressed it against Steve's faceplate.  _319_ . Not bad. Not undoable. 

Just as Bucky was tucking the altimeter back into his robes, a muffled noise registered with Steve, somewhere above their heads. Confused, Steve glanced up. A blur of moment, a swirl of mist. Then suddenly, Baron Zemo's hateful face was charging at him through the mist, sword drawn and slashing out.

Steve only managed to avoid the attack out of pure shock: his hands lost their grip on the building surface and slipped, sending in down fifty feet in seconds. When he regained his grip, Steve threw his head back, trying to see through the blank whiteness above his head. He caught a glimpse of something, just for a  _second_ , through the gap in the mist his own falling body had just made. It was Bucky, darting backwards as Zemo's blade slashed through the mist, heading for his chest. Then the mist remade itself, blocking Steve's view. Steve screamed, trying to force his voice loud enough to be heard through the thick mist, fifty feet away. 

Nothing. Only muffled, cloying silence about Steve's head. Scrambling at the smooth surface of the building in front of him, Steve gritted his teeth and started to haul himself back up. He wasn't leaving Bucky alone with Baron Zemo. Not defenseless as he was. Steve's arms strained, his legs ached. He'd already done this climb once today: his body wasn't ready to do it again, and with hundreds of extra pounds of supplies dangling from his chest. Still, he had been given a reprieve, in the form of a seven hundred foot drop. He could do this. He could get to Bucky.

His right hand slipped in its own blood as his torn glove fought to gain traction with its last remaining grips. Grimacing, Steve wiped his hand on his robes, ignoring the way the red stood out bright on the white of the cloth. It didn't matter. They wouldn't be making this climb ever again: not now that they had been found out. All that mattered now was getting to Bucky, and getting him down safely. And maybe giving that Baron Zemo asshole a good hard sock in the jaw, for everything he'd done.

There! Up ahead, some shadows in the mist. Steve climbed faster, practically jumping himself upwards with his thighs, slamming his hands to the surface of the skyscraper for traction. The heel of his palm stung with every slap to the side of the building, his breath came in shorter and shorter gasps. But there, there! Bucky, just above his head! Clinging to the building helplessly with two feet and one hand, other hand holding a short knife in it—something they packed in case they needed to cut some rope or wires. Not for self-defense. Zemo was coming at him with his sword, swinging freely on a line of something that looked sturdier than rope. Steel, or maybe some of those carbon tubes his friend Sam had been talking about, once. Whatever it was, it had scuffs on it, little marks where Bucky's knife had probably slashed at it, to no avail. Steve gritted his teeth and climbed faster. They were fifteen feet away, maybe twenty. Zemo slashed at Bucky, grin contorting his face around the small rebreather that fit snugly in his mouth and nose. Bucky blocked the blade with his knife, deflecting it to the side.

Steve didn't even see it happen. Somehow, between one moment and the next, Bucky's grip slipped. He had been holding onto the side of the skyscraper, and then he wasn't.

“Bucky! No!” Steve's hand shot out, his body thrown as far off the side of the building as he could be without falling himself. But Bucky was too far away, his body tumbling too far out from the building face: maybe from his movement dodging the blow. Steve didn't know, he didn't know why or how, all he knew was that Bucky was falling past him, hands reaching wildly out toward the skyscraper, toward Steve, toward anything he could possibly grab onto. But there was nothing, nothing for him to grab but air.

Steve stared after him, hand reaching uselessly down after him, mouth contorted into a single silent “no” that was still on his lips, voice swallowed away in shock, lost in the white mists.

A triumphant laugh, and a slash of air above his head. Steve dropped down five feet in shock, head snapping up to spot Zemo, still suspended above him. Steve saw red, his vision going black around the edges as he stared up into that malicious, selfish, cruel face.

But Bucky might be alive down there, below him. Bucky might have regained his grip, Bucky might have fallen but only been injured. Steve had to get down there, as fast as he could. So Steve relaxed his grip, sliding down the side of the skyscraper in as fast of a fall as he could manage while maintaining some semblance of control. There would be time for anger and tears later.

And even if Bucky was dead, Steve had half of the supplies. He had to make it back down, he had to make it back to the ghetto, back to his friends and family, neighbors and all the kids. They needed the supplies he had: Bucky or no.

No matter how fast Steve dropped, Zemo was dropping faster. That damned steel line of his, it was bringing Zemo inexorably closer to Steve. As he controlled his fall, Steve counted the feet in his head silently.  _Ten feet down. Another ten. Another. Forty feet_ . At a hundred feet, Zemo slashed at Steve's head again, this time cutting through one of the straps that held the mask to his face. Steve sucked in a breath and slapped at the mask, letting it fall free. Maybe two hundred feet left to fall. He could hold his breath—enough. 

Ten feet more, and ten feet more. Steve's lungs were becoming uncomfortably tight already. Well, that was just swell, wasn't it? Another slash, this time striking the back of his scalp. Steve ignored the flash of pain. It was nothing. Ten more feet, and Zemo was on top of him, sword slashing at his shoulder. Steve's lungs burned more now, pressure building within him. He no choice in the matter: he was going to have to take Zemo out before he continued on any further.

Steve stopped his descent and leaned back, getting a good sight of Zemo as he dropped the last two feet to meet him. Zemo's first strike forward was a sloppy one, hurried in his rush to catch Steve off-guard. Steve dodged it easily, releasing his grip for a second to drop a foot, then clamping back on to the side of the building. Zemo was going to have to do better than that if he was going to take down Steve.

As Zemo came level with him again, he struck out: more controlled this time, more calculated. Steve couldn't dodge this one, so he blocked it, deflecting it away from his midsection off his forearm. It cut through his robes, but didn't break the skin. There was one thing to be said about the voluminous layers that the citizens of New Versailles wore. Zemo slashed again, eyes gleaming madly above his rebreather, disgust battling with excitement in a twisted display of all the basest emotions a human could have. Steve lunged backwards, hands and feet tumbling over the smooth face of the skyscraper, over each other, in a mad barely-controlled cartwheeling fall. He avoided Zemo's blade again, just barely, but slid several heart-lurching feet down the face of the building before he regained his balance.

He should have cut the bags from his waist ages ago. But with Bucky down, Steve was the only hope his ghetto had left. It couldn't all be for nothing. Bucky's...  _Bucky_ couldn't be for nothing. Steve  _had_ to come back with something, have something to show for all this horror and pain.

Zemo slashed again, sending Steve stumbling down another few feet, trying to descend as fast as he could without losing his grip, but it could never be fast enough. Another slash, and this time Steve wasn't fast enough. He tried to fall, tried to dodge, but the grips held too tight and Steve's hands and feet weren't quick enough. Zemo landed a blow with his sword through Steve's shoulder.

Searing pain, tearing and shooting and leaking, horrible pain. Steve cried out, grips slipping before he steadied himself, survival instinct blessedly winning out over the burning, renting pain through his shoulder. Though at this point, Steve didn't know if his body's will to survive was more blessing or curse.

Zemo grinned, eyes crinkling up wickedly above the breathing apparatus covering his nose and mouth. Steve let himself slide down a dozen feet. How many more to go? Where was the bottom? He had lost count through the burning, the fire in his lungs, nose, and throat, the dissimilar but burning all the same fire in his shoulder.

He had one shot left. One thing left within him—left to him by the good Doctor Erskine, to get him out if times ever got too tough. Gritting his teeth through the pain, Steve leaned forward, pushing as much of his weight down onto his feet as he could and praying the already tried grips would hold. The rest of his weight he distributed to his chest, pressed against the side of the building. His core muscles shook with the strain of balancing like this, but it was necessary: he had to take off his gloves to do what he needed to do.

Side of the building scraping against his forearms and stomach through his linen robes, weight of the canvas bags sliding him down the side of the building no matter how hard he dug his feet into it, Steve ripped off his gloves and threw them away. A hundred feet left to the bottom, two hundred feet, fifty feet: it didn't matter how much was left. He wouldn't live to see the bottom if he didn't do this now, no matter how close or far it was.

“Going to slap me, ghetto trash?”

With his teeth Steve ripped open his palms, exposing the implants Erskine had put in there two years ago, when he first made Steve into the man he was today. Zemo was watching him interestedly, his murderous instinct apparently suppressed thanks to his curiosity.

Staring Zemo straight in his beady, angry, little eyes, Steve growled out: “You tell me: this feel like a slap to you?” Then he brought his palms together, joining the two metal implants inside his bloody, battered palms.

Instantly a light shot out from them, spreading out from Steve like a star going supernova. The golden light hovered in front of him like a shield for a long moment, glowing and swirling, like the mist that was slowly poisoning Steve, burning him into cinder from the inside out. But this light was something altogether different from the mist: warm where the mist was cold, golden where the mist was pale and colorless, protective instead of vicious, poisonous, noxious. Just as Zemo was cocking his head curiously at the plane of light, hovering in the space between Steve and himself, Steve turned his palms out towards Zemo, aiming them at his cruel, uncaring visage. Then, with all his might, Steve _pushed_ the shield of light out in front of him, as hard and as fast as he could.

The light reacted instantly to Steve's extrasensory command. The shield spread out like an explosion, a tidal wave of particulate matter surging forward, slamming into Zemo like a sheet of six-inch thick steel. Zemo screamed, his hands going up to protect his face, his body knocking backwards dozens of feet, swinging limply on the line.

This was Steve's only chance. Turning away from Zemo and back to face the wall of the building he was still somehow clinging to, Steve grabbed on with bloody palms and started sliding down, barely maintaining any semblance of control over his descent. At this point, all he wanted to do was make sure he didn't land straight on his neck. If he could manage that, his journey down the side of this blighted skyscraper could be considered a success.

The ground was closer than he had thought, thank God. Maybe fifty feet, instead of the hundred or two he thought might be left. Unsurprisingly, Steve was traveling too fast as he approached solid ground. He hit the muddy field that marked the outer perimeter of New Versailles hard, pain flaring up through his right ankle as he did. Steve collapsed to the ground, body too much aflame, too much in pain to do more than to crumble, fall, fold.

 _Bucky_. The word whispered through his mind, pressed itself against his closed eyelids. Steve's eyes opened, body somehow moving beyond what he thought possible, keeping going when surely he should be resting, when surely he should be dead. _Bucky_. He was still out there, somewhere at the bottom of the wall. There was a _chance_ he was alive. And if he wasn't... Steve swallowed, throat burning, from sorrow or the mist, it was all the same at this point. Bucky had half the looted supplies. Either way, Steve had to find him, where he had fallen.

Steve levered himself to his feet with bloodied palms, entire body aflame, mind aflame, not an inch of him left that wasn't burning. One step towards the wall, then another. Above him, Zemo's screams were still reverberating off the wall of the skyscraper, echoing down to the lush ground beneath Steve's feet.

As Steve took one step back towards the building, then two, his eyes and lungs and shoulder and palms burning, a strong, black hand reached out through the mist and encircled Steve's wrist, dragging him away from the bottom of the building.

“Sam!” Steve tried to call out, but found himself wracked with coughs as he croaked the word.

“Get your ass out of here, Steve!” Sam shouted back. His voice was muffled: he was wearing a gas mask. Steve stared at it jealously, lungs burning, eyes watering, body feeling like it was powering down.

But there wasn't time for jealousy or longing for clean air. Bucky was still out there, Bucky's supplies still needed to be collected, Bucky... _Bucky_ needed to be collected.

“Bucky-” Steve gasped, throat burning, trying to fight through to explain.

But Sam was dragging him away, into the urban jungle that was pressed against the dead, barren, mud-moat surrounding New Versailles. The buildings, beyond the poisonous white mist, beckoned invitingly. “Steve, we've got to get you out of here!”

“ _Bucky_.” The mist was closing in around Steve. His lungs were shutting down, finally giving in under the noxious poison of that white mist that surrounded him, infected him.

Steve collapsed into Sam's arms, his world going white.  _Bucky_ .

 

 


	2. Unsustainable

 

His world was dark again.

Steve's mind registering the natural, dim light of the ghetto that he'd lived his whole life in. It was a sharp contrast to the bright, gleaming light of New Versailles. He sat up, the name _Bucky!_ screaming in the corners of his mind, urging him to action. But the movement was too quick for his broken and damaged body to take, the fire pouring back into his every cell like electricity down a live wire. Steve's arms collapsed out from under him, sending him splaying back across the rickety mattress he was lying on.

“Stay there, my boy. Stay there. Your body isn't healed yet.”

Steve groaned and tried to move again, but found himself being held down by a single gentle hand on his uninjured shoulder. Doc Erskine shouldn't have been able to hold him down quite so easily, but Steve was feeling just about strong enough to keep breathing and no stronger. Even that was a struggle: every breath feeling like it was tearing at his lungs, every exhale threatening to strangle him with a coughing fit. So Steve stayed under Erskine's hand, as distasteful as the situation was.

He was in Doc Erskine's house: he recognized as much. The well-worn refrigerator in one corner was a dead giveaway: no one else in Steve's ghetto had a refrigerator. The rest of the house was much the same as Steve remembered seeing it last, when he and Bucky had swung by the day before to pick up their finalized grocery list. Maybe two days before, if the dim light filtering in through the murky windows in Erskine's one-room house were any indication of the time of day. It looked like morning—Steve must have slept the the rest of the day and night away, recovering. So much time wasted.

“Here.” Erskine removed his hand when Steve obediently stilled beneath it. “I've patched you up as best I could when you were out, but you need medicine.”

“Bucky?” Steve asked, voice cracking. He couldn't leave the question for any longer.

He could already tell by the look on Erskine's face, but he had to _hear_ it. Erskine passed a mug over to him. Steve, much more carefully this time, pushed himself up on his left elbow so he could accept the mug and drink from it. It was something hot with a medicinal aftertaste.

“I'm afraid he didn't make it.”

“His supplies,” Steve insisted, eyes hot. Bucky was his best friend, Bucky was his oldest friend, from back when Steve was a sickly little orphan and before Erskine worked his healing skills on Steve's sad, weak body. But the supplies were more important than Bucky, more important than any of them as individuals.

Erskine shook his head. Steve laid his head back down on the thin pillow, all the breath leaving his body. He almost wished it would stay out, that he'd never draw air into his lungs ever again. Bucky was gone, the supplies were gone, they'd never be able to make a raid ever again, now that they had been found out. His great plan to help, to keep his friends and neighbors alive for a little while longer, had failed. Was over, forever.

“Where's Bucky's body?” Steve asked dully, staring at the unfinished ceiling above his head. The only reason he even knew there was such thing a a “finished” ceiling was because of what he saw in the storeroom in New Versailles. Their _closets_ were better than any house anyone lived in, outside that defensive mist.

“No.”

Steve's eyes shot to the side, to where Erskine was taking his mug from the table and returning to his kitchen sink with it, against the far wall.

“What do you mean, 'no'?” Steve growled. His throat suddenly itched, feeling like it was stuffed with sawdust and sending him into a vicious coughing fit. Erskine waited for it to subside before he answered.

“They are patrolling the side of the building where you two came down, day and night. They expect you to come back for him, or the supplies, and when you do: they will take you.”

Steve closed his eyes against the nausea suddenly churning in his gut, but that only made it worse. With his eyes closed he could see Bucky's body clearly, in his mind: damaged and broken, lying out there in the sun, exposed to the elements and whichever creatures might come to pick at his corpse. He couldn't leave him like that. Even if he got taken, Steve couldn't just leave Bucky's body out there in the sun, to be mocked and stared at and eaten and decomposing for all the nasty, wretched citizens of New Versailles to see.

“We can't leave him out there,” Steve gritted out, careful of his throat.

“No, no, my boy.” Erskine was back at his bedside, friendly face peering down at him through little crooked glasses, mouth turned upward in reassurance behind a stubbly beard. “We had the Barton boy take a look, during the night. His body is gone: presumably taken into New Versailles and incinerated. He is not left out there—we are just meant to _think_ he is.”

Steve calmed a little at that. Barton—first name Clint—was their resident look-out. Had been since they were kids and there was an accident, costing Clint his sight. Erskine fixed him up good, somehow. He didn't talk about it much, and neither did Clint, but one day Erskine and Clint left for the largest ghetto around, without a word to anyone. Three days later and they were back, Clint with a new pair of mechanical eyes and complaining about the worst headache ever because everything was just so damn _clear_. If Clint had taken a look and hadn't seen Bucky's body, even with all the mist, then it wasn't there. That was good.

With at least that small comfort settled in his mind, Steve was able to turn his attention to himself, and the injuries he had sustained in his desperate flight from New Versailles. His shoulder hurt, stitches for sure pulling at the skin under a bandage. His throat, chest, and nose grabbed the overwhelming majority of his attention, every breath sudden a painful shudder through his body.

“What's the damage, Doc?” Steve asked with a sigh.

Erskine laughed sarcastically: “Oh, so now you ask? Let me pull out the _list_ , shall I?”

Steve sighed again and settled against the thin pillow. He was in for a _talking to_ , apparently. No big surprise there.

“Well, let's see.” Erskine tapped at Steve's bare chest. “Your lungs, throat, and nasal passages are all burned, thanks to you breathing in so much of the mist. Where your gas mask went-”

“Baron Zemo,” Steve explained. “He got it. Came after me with a sword, on the way down. Slashed it right off.”

“I suppose that would explain the stab wound to your shoulder, then?” Erskine asked, poking lightly at the thick layers of gauze and sterile wrap around Steve's shoulder. Steve glanced down at it, feeling the pull of stitches again.

“Yeah,” Steve confirmed. “That would be where that came from.”

Erskine tutted. “That will heal up soon enough. No strenuous movement for the next two weeks, but it will heal. As for the damage you did to your respiratory system, that will require rest as well, in addition to these.” Erskine held up an opaque bottle, rattling it around so Steve' could hear the pills inside. “Twice a day, morning and night. Take it with food.”

Steve lifted his good hand to catch the bottle, only to stop with his hand held in mid-air, staring at the thick bandages wrapped around his palm. He glanced at his other palm to find a matching bandage. Right. That. He had that injury, too.

“Ah, yes.” Doc Erskine removed his glasses and wiped them on his shirttail, smiling the tired smile of a doctor who had seen far too much in his time but still managed to find humor in the quiet, non-life-threatening moments of his work. “You used the defensive system I implanted in you?”

Steve nodded. “Had to. Zemo was going to kill me.”

“No, no: of course, my boy.” Erskine sat himself down on the side of Steve's bed, patting his leg reassuringly. “I am very glad you did use it, and glad that it worked well enough to save your life.” A pause, and a sly little grimace. “I am not so pleased to see you appeared to have ripped your palms open with your teeth, but, ah.” Erskine peered closely at Steve's face, eyes narrowed. “I did tell you to always use a knife, yes? To make the cut as small and smooth as possible?”

“I didn't exactly have time to be surgical with it,” Steve pointed out. His face fell. “And Bucky had the knife.”

A soft, understanding “ah” escaped Erskine lips. He patted Steve's leg again, eyes cast downward in sympathy for Steve's loss.

After a moment he continued: “Well, you won't have to worry about taking such gruesome measures again in the future.” Erskine nodded at both Steve's palms. “I opted to leave the contact points exposed, from now on.”

Steve frowned, confused. “But... the sentinels. I'll get caught out at the first prothesis check. They'll see them and execute me, right there on the spot.” Not that Steve was feeling particularly attached to the idea of living at the moment, but at the very least he didn't want to go out in such a stupid and easily avoided way. There was more good he could do for the people around here—there _had_ to be. He couldn't throw all that away just yet.

Erskine looked at Steve like he had missed something very vital, and maybe he had. After all, Steve _had_ just woken up from a sixteen-hour nap, stuffed with enough medicine and gauze to start his own hospital. He could probably be granted a little bit of leeway if he had missed something.

“My boy: you are never going to report to a prothesis check again. Or _any_ check. They know who you are, Steve Rogers. Baron Zemo knows your name and face—they all do, by now.” Carefully, seriously, Erskine looked Steve full in the eye and told him: “Your life as a registered citizen of this ghetto is over, my dear boy. From now on, you live underground. It must be. There is no other way.”

Steve breathed. Just breathed, for a while. His eyes, once he could tear them away from Erskine, drifted back up to the ceiling. That unfinished ceiling with the rusty pipes and the sad, leaky, aluminum roof. Steve had probably known, somewhere in the back of his mind, that this would be the end result of the events on the side of that building in New Versailles. You couldn't just walk away from some like that and back into your old life. But to have it spelled out for him so clearly, so soon... Steve's hands flexed against the gauze wrapped around both palms. To have such a physical realization of his new life, already in his skin... Steve wasn't ready for this. Not yet.

Apparently Doc Erskine knew this, and didn't think Steve needed to be ready just yet. Because he patted at Steve's leg one more time before he stood up, bed creaking noisily at the change in weight. “Rest now,” Erskine demanded. “When you wake again, we'll get some soup in that bottomless pit you call a stomach. Then we can talk more about where you'll go from here.”

Already Steve felt himself getting drowsy—he thought maybe it was the medicine Erskine had made him drink earlier. Before he fell back asleep, though, Steve couldn't help but cling to one point of hope in Erskine's words: “You have a plan?”

Erskine's laugh followed Steve as sleep pulled him under: “My boy: I have plans within plans.”

* * *

 When Steve woke a second time, it was late in the evening. He could tell by the red light fighting to shine its way through Erskine's murky windows. If it was the same day as the last time Steve woke up, he had no way of knowing, but he thought maybe it was. He didn't feel ravenous enough for two whole days to have passed, he didn't think.

“Ah, good. I was just heating up the soup,” Erskine called out from the other side of the house, where his tiny kitchen was located.

Steve didn't need Erskine to tell him: his stomach could already smell it (if stomachs could smell, but his nose was certainly feeling too burned and miserable to be doing its job at the moment), rumbling loudly at the prospect of a warm meal. Carefully Steve pushed himself up, mindful of Erskine's watchful eye and warnings not to exert himself too much for the next couple weeks.

Erskine brought the soup to his bedside on a tray. Keeping the cracked, steaming bowl company on the scrap metal passing for a dinner tray was a glass filled with only slightly cloudy water and another cup with what looked like the medicine Erskine had pushed into Steve's hands the last time he was awake. A tin of peaches was open with chopsticks sticking straight up out of it. Steve frowned at the bad luck, but he knew Erskine wasn't the superstitious sort—man of science and all that. Wordlessly Steve removed the chopsticks from the peaches and set them down on the tray, keeping his eyes down to avoid Erskine's knowingly little smile.

“The peaches weren't meant for me,” Steve pointed out as he dug into the soup. It was a minestrone, made from the tins of veggies Steve picked up on the grocery run. There might have even been some little bits of meat in there, though what exactly kind of meat it was, Steve wasn't about to ask. The soup was sweet and rich on his tongue, nutrients feeling like they were already bleeding into his system, giving his body the strength it needed to heal. There was too much salt, but there always was with the preserved food Steve and... and _Bucky_ managed to get from the storerooms in New Versailles.

Erskine ignored Steve's protest at the peaches entirely, instead just watching him eat. Steve took a long drink from the glass of water on his tray. It was three-quarters empty when he set it back down. Without a word Erskine took the glass and carried it across the room to his kitchen sink, filling it up from the filter he had attached to his faucet. Steve watched him, shoveling more of the soup into his mouth. The sweetness of the peaches beckoned, as a contrast to the salty-savory taste of the soup, but Steve was saving those for dessert.

“How are the filter installations going?” Steve asked as Erskine shuffled back over to his bedside with the refilled glass of water.

Erskine sighed as he settled onto the side of the bed with Steve. “Sasha has installed three more since you left. We only have another dozen or so before her and I will have to make more.”

Steve frowned. “Only three? Can't she move faster?”

Erskine shrugged. “Sasha is working as quickly as she can, but with every installation, she must teach the family how to remove and reinstall the filter for themselves, lest they get caught by a check. Teaching people this will save their life—there is no use rushing it.”

“Having clean water will save their lives,” Steve pointed out, but he let the issue drop. Erskine was right: to be caught with a piece of technology even as basic as sans-charcoal (which was too hard to come by) filtration systems would mean surely being taken away at the next check, never to be seen again. The precautions were necessary.

With the soup finished, Steve moved onto the canned peaches, sucking each one slowly on his tongue, savoring the sugary juices it was packed in. Now that he had a full belly, Steve felt satiated enough to start a real conversation with Erskine.

“You promised me you'd tell me why you left the contacts exposed on my palms,” Steve prompted.

Erskine shrugged. “And I did: no more checks for you, my boy. From this point on, you are a fugitive. You'll never be able to live a normal life again.”

Steve felt the weight of this proclamation settle in the center of his chest, like a fire shovel pressing him down into the fire. Steve breathed deeply, pushing his own distress away. If that was his situation, then that was his situation. He had known the risks when he signed up for these grocery runs years ago, known that at the least he would be become an outlaw, at worse he could be captured, tortured, publicly executed. The dangers had all been worth it, when weighed against the good Steve could do just one or two successful raids. He and Bucky had managed _twenty-eight_ over the years. It had been worth it, even if it meant Steve's life was effectively over from this point on.

He just wished he had been able to do more good. Twenty-eight successful raids seemed large when weighed against the minimum he had expected to pull off at the beginning of this enterprise, but so very small in the larger scheme of things, in the potential for good Steve knew he had within him. If only there was something else he could do.

“Are you sure?” Steve asked. He sipped more slowly at the water this time, relishing the feel of the lukewarm liquid down his burning chest. “I mean... are you sure I can't...” Steve cut himself off, not sure how he was planning on ending that sentence.

“Have I ever steered you wrong?” Erskine asked.

“Well, Bucky's dead,” Steve pointed out flatly.

“Point taken.” Erskine tugged his glasses from his face and cleaned them with his shirt, sighing. After a moment Erskine returned the glasses to his nose, wrapping the frames tightly around his ears. “If your question is what is the next step, what is the thing to do now...” There was a twinkle in Erskine's eye, behind the reflective glass of his lenses. “Perhaps I have some thoughts on the matter.”

Erskine tugged at the tray in Steve's lap, leaving him with just the chipped mug that contained whatever medicine Erskine had given him earlier. “But perhaps that conversation should be saved for when you are more healed,” Erskine pointed out.

Steve sighed and stared down at the thick reddish liquid in the chipped mug, tilting it from side to side in his big hands to watch the syrupy mixture swirl. He wasn't getting any more from Erskine today.

In one motion Steve threw back the mug and swallowed down the concoction, doing his best to suppress the cough that threatened at its slightly bitter taste. Erskine took the cup from Steve as he pressed a hand to his mouth, chest heaving slightly with a few aborted coughs.

* * *

 Two days passed like that, then three, then four. By week's end Steve was feeling more like himself: the thick gauze wraps were coming off, to be replaced by easily removable bandages. The stitches in his shoulder were holding nicely, to come out in another week. His lungs were working again, the poisonous mist apparently not having been in his system long enough to cause any permanent damage. The worst of it, the part still needing more than an absent-minded tending to, was the palms of his hands.

“This is your own fault, of course,” Erskine reminded him that day a week after the disastrous raid on the storeroom while tending to his palms. “I always told you: clean cuts. Not tearing into it like a dog with a steak.”

“Is that why you're leaving the contacts exposed?” Steve grumbled. “Because you don't trust me to use them right?”

He still didn't like the idea. Had been fighting it since day one, since Erskine had told him he wouldn't be stitching his skin back over the two little metal nubs in the center of his palms. The threat of prosthesis checks were one of the few constants in Steve's life, something he had known since a sentinel had thrown Bucky to the ground and ripped the toy robot arm out of his hand when he was five, then smacked him across the skull with it. No prosthetic enhancements. That was the rule: as sure as those born in the ghettos were banned from New Versailles and the poisonous mist killed anyone who dared try.

Then again, Steve had already broken the latter rule, which a week ago seemed as sure and true as the laws of physics. Maybe exposed prosthetics weren't as dangerous as had been ingrained in his psyche. Clint walked around with them every day of his life, staring right at you in your eyes, bold as brass. Steve himself wasn't the bold type, not like Clint. But maybe now was the time. After all, as Doc Erskine kept pointing out: what else did he have to lose?

The bandages covering Steve's palms fell away beneath Erskine's careful hands, revealing the mess Steve had made of his. The skin was more smooth now, at least, around the center. Cleaned up from the jagged, torn, uneven skin Steve had created, three hundred feet straight up the side of a building in New Versailles. The two metal contact points were almost white—rhodium, Erskine had said. Inscribed in their centers were a star in each: a glowing blue star. Those were the photons, said Erskine. The stuff that made the light shield that Steve could throw out in front of him, when he brought the two points in contact with each other. That was about as much as Steve understood all that tech, sitting under his skin.

“If we leave the stars exposed, what if they touch?” Steve asked. “On accident?”

Erskine glanced up at Steve, eyes twinkling. “Perhaps get out of the practice of clapping,” Erskine cautioned.

Steve frowned over at Erskine, resisting the urge to flex his palms now that they were out of their dressings. “What about at night, while I'm asleep? Wasn't that half the point of keeping them covered up? Besides hiding them from checks?”

Sighing, Erskine stood up from Steve's bedside and walked away, to the other side of his small house. After a moment of rummaging through a cabinet he came back and tossed something down into Steve's lap. Steve peered down, carefully holding his hands out of the way. It was a pair of thick leather work gloves, dyed red. Steve looked back up at Erskine, eyebrows raised.

“Gloves?” he asked. “That's your solution?”

Erskine shrugged. “Maybe low-tech, but maybe sometimes that is for the best.” Sitting back down on the bed, Erskine got back to work reapplying healing salve and bandaging up Steve's palms.

“Speaking of solutions...” Steve tried. It wasn't his best segue ever, but Steve was getting pretty impatient just lying around here doing nothing as he waited for his body to heal. He wanted answers, results, a plan of some kind. And Erskine had been holding out on him.

This time, however, Erskine sat back at the aborted sentence and looked Steve in the eye. Maybe he wouldn't ignore it, today. Maybe Steve could finally have a _plan_ laying out how he could be useful again.

“Have you heard of Tony Stark?”

Steve stiffened. _Everyone_ had heard of Tony Stark. He was the asshole who ran the biggest ghetto this side of New Versailles. Of course, he didn't _run_ it in the legal sense: he was a slum lord, accumulating his wealth on the backs of the people that came to him looking for help, paying whatever extortionate prices he thought fit to charge. He was everything Steve stood against: using the poor state of his neighbors to his advantage, for his own selfish ends.

“I've heard of him, same as anyone else,” Steve replied carefully.

“I think you should seek him out, offer your services. Go to work for him.”

Steve's lip curled up in disgust. “For _Tony Stark_? What good would that do?”

Erskine shrugged. “You never know until you talk to him. And since you cannot exactly help anyone as you are, out in the open, and Tony Stark has a talent for existing under the radar of the sentinels and their checks... perhaps you two would find each other to be mutually useful.”

Steve fell silent, no longer bothering to protest. If this was Erskine's great plan for him, going to seek out the slumlord Tony Stark, then there was no point protesting any further. Erskine obviously thought this was a good idea, and Steve found it just as obvious that it _wasn't_ , that it was a morally repugnant course of action.

“These raids you've been going on... these 'grocery runs', as you and Bucky were so fond of calling them...” As Erskine spoke, Steve did his best to meet the name of his best friend head on, without collapsing under the weight of his grief. It only somewhat worked.

Erskine took Steve's chin in his hand and forced him to look at him, at the serious coldness in his eyes. “The raids: they weren't good enough. They were ultimately good for nothing other than buying time. A stop-gap.”

Steve winced, hard. Erskine kept his grip tight on Steve's chin and forced him to maintain eye contact.

“You were made for some greater, Steven Rogers. I _made_ you for something greater. Food and medicine, these hard goods: they are not what topples empires, what overthrows dictatorships. Keeping the people fed, this is good, this is necessary: but it is not sufficient. You need more if you are to bring about the change you feel in your bones. The change you were put here to cause.”

Erskine's words hit Steve hard. They were every doubt and every hope he ever had about himself: his dreams and his nightmares. Swallowing tightly, Steve croaked out: “But what? How? _What am I supposed to do_ , if not what we've been doing?”

“This is why you must go see Tony Stark,” Erskine said. He released Steve's chin from his grip, now that he was apparently satisfied that he had gotten Steve's attention.

“Tony Stark-”

“Tony Stark has connections you don't,” Erskine cut him off. “Connections _I_ don't. He may seem like a petty smuggler, a slumlord, but his resources make him capable of much more. Food may lose a war, but it won't win one.”

“What do I need from him, then?” Steve asked. “What am I supposed to be asking him for?”

“Information.”

The word hung in the air between them like a prayer. The way Doc Erskine said it, it was like an invocation. But for all the power that Erskine seemed to put behind the word, Steve didn't understand.

“What kind of information?” he asked. “And how am I supposed to get it from Stark? What am I supposed to do with it when I've got it?”

A sharp rap at the door. Steve fell silent instantly, body almost seizing up with tension. Erskine stood calmly, more calmly than Steve thought he could ever manage in such a situation, and went to the door. Even though Erskine's little house was no more than twenty paces across, the rapping came again at the door before he reached it, more insistent this time. Steve tensed up even more, blankets pulled up tight over his chin. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. Worst came to worse, he might be able to dive out a window, but that would mean leaving Doc Erskine behind, and Steve wasn't about to do that. If the sentinels were at the door and knew Erskine had been harboring a fugitive, they'd kill him. Or worse.

Just as Erskine was reaching out to tug at the handle of his door a familiar voice called out from the other side: “Doc? It's me! It's Sam. Open up, quick!”

Erskine opened the door then, and Steve saw just how worried he had been when his whole body sagged with relief, face breaking out into a wrinkled smile as Sam hurried in past him.

Sam himself was missing the relief that had passed through the room at the announcement of his name. He was agitated, looking this way and that before hurrying over to Steve's bed.

“We gotta get you out of here,” he said without preamble.

Steve pushed himself up on the bed, searching Sam's tumultuous brown eyes for answers. “What is it?”

“Checks,” Sam explained. Steve was up in an instant, tugging on his cargo pants and grey-blue t-shirt. A rust colored long sleeve button up went over that, and finally his blue coat. Steve was grabbing at the ends of the coat just below his hips as he stepped into his boots, fumbling with the zipper with his bandaged hands. Sam stepped in to help him, zipping him up in a smooth motion and then slapping him on his good shoulder.

“Let's get you out of here.”

Glancing around the room one last time, Steve noticed the red gloves still sitting on Erskine's bed. He snatched them up and pulled them over his bandaged hands, then tugged on his grey-blue pageboy hat. He checked around the room again, patting at his pockets. No ident card—right. His would be no good anymore. Looks like he _was_ going to have to associate with some of the lower tier members of society—lower-tiered in terms of morality, not necessary wealth—for a little while, at least. Unsurprisingly, Doc Erskine was right. Steve ground his teeth in frustration.

Off to Stark it was, then. But first, Steve was going to need to get some supplies before he made the journey. Stark's ghetto was a good two day's journey away, if you managed to get all the best transportation the ghettos outside New Versailles offered. Steve had a feeling he wouldn't be taking the best transportation.

Before he let Sam bustle him out the back door, Steve turned to Erskine, grabbing at his elbow. Erskine gazed back at him calmly, like he didn't have a dozen illegal pieces of tech lying around his house in plain view. “Doctor Erskine. I...” Suddenly Steve was at a loss for words, in this moment when time was so precious. “Thank you. For everything,” he finally managed to get out.

It wasn't enough, to capture everything Erskine meant to Steve, everything he had done for him. But it would have to be enough, for now. Erskine seemed to understand, because he clasped Steve's good shoulder and squeezed tightly. “You have been a good boy, Steve Rogers. But now you have to go.”

Steve nodded, words catching in his throat. Erskine patted his cheek.

“Years ago, I made you physically strong enough to fight for us. Now you have to go and _be_ strong enough.” With that, Erskine untangled Steve from him and shoved him, hard, in the center of his chest. “Now _go_ ,” Erskine ordered. “ _Be_ strong enough. For all our sakes'.”

The sound of the ghetto was rising outside Erskine's walls: a slow but noticeable increase in volume, in pitch, of the general hum of the population. The sentinels were on their way.

Sam was waiting for Steve at the back door, hand on the knob and eyes scanning through the little window. Steve ran to him, both men busting through the door at nearly the same time.

It was mid-morning, the ghetto already well into its daily routines, going about those tasks which were required for living around here. The buildings around Erskine's house were mostly residential, though as Sam and Steve darted down the winding, narrow streets together, their surroundings became more commercial. Vendors hawked their wares: clothing, bread, drink. Down a back alley Steve almost ran over a prosthetics vendor's stall, just barely recovering in time to catch an artificial foot as it slid off the table. Steve tossed it back at the vendor as he ran, shouting “Sentinels!” for good measure. The vendor was already half-packed up by the time Sam and Steve flung themselves around a corner and down the next alleyway. All the black market vendors had scanners on them, tuned to detect sentinels in the area. But it didn't hurt to help them get a head start.

“We've got to get to Clint's first,” Steve told Sam as they raced through the streets.

Clint's house was just on the other side of the black market district, a cozy little makeshift thing with far too many wires and antennae running out of it to be anything but an illegal hideaway. Luckily, one of the many pieces of tech that Clint, and his sister-orphan Natasha, had acquired over the years was a camouflage wave emitter. Made the place effectively invisible to the sentinel's mechanical eyes, but visible to flesh-and-blood human beings. Thanks to the laziness (or fear) of the citizens of New Versailles, it was so rare for one of them to come out and wander through the streets of the ghettos themselves that Clint and his elaborate black market set-up had remained undiscovered for a good fifteen years now.

This also meant Clint's house was one of the best places in town to hide during a sentinel patrol. Which meant that by the time Sam and Steve got there, it was practically bursting with people who needed to stay out of sight of the sentinels for whatever reasons. Prosthetics, fugitives, tech dealers who had been caught one too many times: all found their way to Clint and Natasha's small house, for the few hours it took the sentinels to sweep their ghetto and move on.

Steve winced. Natasha. She had Bucky had been seeing each other for almost a year now. She must have already heard the news in the week that Steve had gone to ground at Erskine's. This wasn't going to be fun.

Sam rapped twice on the door, Steve with his back to the house, watching for sentinels. After a beat of quiet a voice called out from inside: “What's the password?”

“Fuck off and let us in, birdbrain,” was Sam's reply.

Steve snorted as the door clicked open behind him, and then Clint was dragging the two of them into the cramped space.

“You guys are assholes, you know that?” Clint asked.

Steve shrugged as he glanced around the house at everyone gathered in there, sore palms flexing in his gloves. “I didn't say anything,” he pointed out.

Clint grinned at them, crooked and self-deprecating, before pulling them into a hug. Clint was a shorter man than Steve or Sam, though not enough to be called stocky. Average height with a good build but not overwhelmingly muscular, like Steve had become in the last few years. He had blonde hair like Steve's, but unlike Steve's he kept it cut shorter and unkempt, always looking like he just rolled out of bed. The one thing that stood out about him more than anything else was his eyes: they gleamed blue, not naturally like Steve's, but the eerie blue of electricity at work, buzzing in his skull. Prosthetic eyes, from an accident in his youth, that allowed him to see far better than any human—in addition to putting him on the permanent fugitive list, having to hide out from sentinels for the rest of his life.

“What are you two doing here, anyway?” Clint asked. He led them back through his two-room house—practically a mansion compared to what most had around here. Illegality paid well, and between Clint and Natasha's skill sets, they were always able to find lucrative work. “You know there's sentinels out, don't you? Hence the full house.”

“I can't be seen anymore,” Steve explained quietly. They reached the back of the house, the three men huddling up in the far corner of what served as Clint's bedroom, kitchen, and living room. Natasha's room was on the other side of the house, and off-limits to anyone but guests she extended a personal invitation to. Bucky had been one of those guests.

“What, because of the whole...” Clint waved his fingers vaguely, his blue eyes gleaming. “You getting made?”

Steve sighed. “There's that, yes. But then, in light of that, Doc Erskine thought it frivolous to keep my protheses covered.” Steve held up his hands, wiggling his fingers in the red gloves. “Contact points are exposed. Permanently.”

Clint gave a low whistle. “Well. Shit. What the hell you going to do now? Because sorry, but Nat and I aren't really in the market for a new roommate...”

Next to him, Sam snorted and shoved Steve in the shoulder. “Mr. Neat-Freak rooming with you, Clint? The guy who basically hoards all his stuff into a nest to sleep?”

Clint rolled his eyes, the blue flashing bizarrely up, down, around. “The bird jokes are _so_ last year, seriously. When was the last time you even _saw_ a bird, seriously?”

Sam shrugged. “I got my connections.”

Clint snorted. “Sure you do.”

A hush spread through the densely-packed house. Steve's head jerked up from where it had been huddled with Sam and Clint's, looking around at the quiet, scared faces filling the room. After a moment of the thick silence, a low thudding could be just barely discerned in the distance, but growing louder with every step. _Sentinel_. It was close.

A collective held breath, as the footsteps thudded closer. Clint's electronic camouflage was good—it's why everyone was gathered here and not running or hiding in cellars beneath their own houses. But there was always the chance of error, of system failure. Always the chance that the technological geniuses in New Versailles had caught on to their little subversive tricks and modified the sentinels accordingly. With everyone else in the room, Steve held his breath and waited.

After a long, long minute, the footsteps stopped growing louder and started to recede, thumps getting softer and softer into the distance. The collective breath was suddenly released, the room laughing and sighing with relief.

Steve turned back to Clint, ducking his head down. “Erskine told me to go find Stark.”

“ _Stark_?!” Clint's eyes almost seemed like they flashed, but that was just their normal blue glow. “ _Tony_ Stark? What does Erskine think you could get hanging around _that_ asshole?”

“I like it even less than you do,” Steve grumbled.

“Not possible,” Clint shot back. “That guy makes better tech than I could ever _dream_ of, and he kills my fucking profit margin. I gotta basically _give_ my shit away to get anyone to come to me, and even then eighty percent of the time they'll go to Stark instead because he's the fucking name brand and I'm the generic.”

“Professional rivalry _aside_ ,” Steve cut in firmly, “Erskine seems to think I've got something to offer him, and vice versa. He thinks it could be a mutually beneficial relationship.”

Clint snorted, eyebrows raising. “I can think of only one thing you've got to offer Stark that he would want, and for some reason I've got a feeling you wouldn't be down for that.”

“Don't be crude,” Steve chastised.

“I'm not: I'm being realistic, here.”

“Are you going to help me or not?” Steve finally sighed, running a hand through his hair.

Clint held up his hands defensively. “Okay, okay. Don't get so touchy: you know I'll help you, man. Orphans gotta stick together and all that.” Suddenly glancing away, Clint raised his voice to travel through the whole house: “Sentinels are gone, you guys! If you live on the west side, get your ass out of my house!”

About three-quarters of the people in the house emptied out obediently at Clint's command. There was no reason for them to put up a fuss: Clint was well-liked and gave the people more than he could ever be said to be obligated to give. With him expecting so little in return, people had a tendency to grant whatever few courtesies he asked of them.

Clint turned his attention back to Steve. He crossed his arms and nodded his head, eyebrows drawn low over his gleaming blue eyes. “Alright. What do you need from me?”

“Transport for one to Stark's ghetto.”

“Make that two,” Sam cut in.

Steve started, then shot Sam a cutting look. “No, Sam. You're not coming with me.”

Sam shrugged. “Why not? Because I've got so much going for me here? Besides: someone needs to watch that ass of yours, now that Bucky's gone. _Especially_ around Tony Stark, if half the rumors about him are true.”

Clint lazed against the wall, eyes gleaming beneath lowered brows. “Yeah, Rogers: Better bring Sam along to _watch your ass_ around Stark.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Got the message, Barton, thanks. And Sam,” Steve turned to Sam and clasped a hand to his shoulder, “thank you. I'm sure I can use your help—I'd be foolish to reject the offer.”

Sam rolled his eyes and cuffed Steve lovingly upside the head. “Of course, man.”

Steve turned back to Clint. “So that makes it transportation for _two_ to Stark's ghetto. And whatever supplies you can load us up with for the time it'll take to get us there.”

Clint's eyes were calculating, made all the more cold by their electric blue hue. “I can get you to Stark, safe and sound, in about a week. You're going to have to deal with a lot of time squatting in safe houses between here and there-”

Steve shrugged. “Not a problem.”

“Hey Nat!” Clint shouted.

A beat, and then the only interior door of the house opened up, and a head with bright red hair poked out. The woman narrowed her eyes at Clint, doll-like lips narrowing threateningly. Steve's mouth opened and closed, not sure if he should say something.

“What?” she snapped.

“Got a job. Rogers here is a fugie now, and apparently thinks Stark is the man to see about his new lifestyle choice.”

Steve crossed his arms and didn't correct Clint. Even when they were kids, Clint was always like the annoying little brother, poking and poking until he got a reaction from somebody, anybody. Steve knew better than to indulge his teasing.

“Stark?” Natasha's voice was dripping with disdain as she said the name. Her gaze flickered over to Steve for a moment, stony expression cracking just the tinniest bit. Then her jaw hardened and she swung her gaze back to Clint. “Never mind. I don't want to know. You need me to get them an itinerary?”

Clint fluttered his eyelashes at Natasha. “Do it for me?”

Natasha ducked her head back into her bedroom, calling out “Give me an hour,” as she shut the door behind her.

Clint turned to Steve and patted him on the back. “See that? We'll get you on the road tonight, loaded up with enough supplies to last you until you meet the great Tony Stark.”

Steve's stomach churned with nervousness, almost as bad as the night before his and Bucky's first raid. Except this time he didn't have Bucky with him, his big brother in everything but blood, to lend him his confidence. He had Sam by his side, but it wasn't the same. A sudden sense of vertigo overcame Steve as he realized _he_ was the one leading the way this time, the one that made the decisions. He didn't know if he could do it.

But Doctor Erskine believed in him. And even in spite of the disastrous raid with Bucky, Erskine was a smart man, a calculating man. He knew the world far better than Steve did, and he seemed to think that _Steve—_ not Bucky, not Sam or Clint, but Steve—could be the one to do something. Could remake the world.

Straightening his spine and pushing his shoulders back, Steve nodded at Clint. “Tell me what you need me to do.”

 


	3. Madness

  


The morning was already humid and hot in the ghetto, causing Steve's blue shirt to stick to his chest, sweat forming little tracks of darker blue in his shirt, following the natural curves of his muscles. Standing next to him in the shade of a building awning, Sam's dark skin was glistening like a water mirage on distant asphalt. Steve exhaled heavily and removed his hat from his head, wiping a hand through his soaked blond locks. Water droplets flickered down onto his shoulders and chest, dampening the already soaked material even further. Steve replaced the cap on his head and squinted out of the shadows, into the glare of the morning sun illuminating the busy streets.

“Well, that's supposedly the place.” Steve nodded at the innocuous-looking building in front of them. The night before, Steve and Sam had finally made the final leg of their journey, stumbling tiredly into the last of Clint's network of safe houses. The woman who had greeted them there, Bobbi, had pointed out Stark's main office, dark and locked up for the night.

“ _That's where you'll find him,” Bobbi explained. “Tomorrow morning you can go and try your luck. You'll have to charm your way past his own personal sphinx, Pepper Potts, and his guard dog, Happy Hogan.”_

_Sam's mouth twitched in amusement. “What, Tony assign everyone alliterative nicknames?”_

_Steve coughed, then leaned over to Sam: “Bucky Barnes,” he reminded him._

“ _Oh. Right.” Sam frowned. “Guess it's not that weird.”_

“ _What information can you give me on those two people? Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan?”_

_Bobbi grinned at Steve, all pretty smiles and shinning blonde hair. “Pepper Potts is Tony Stark's right-hand woman. She handles all his business, new and old. Tony'll get in there and bust some heads when he needs to, but Pepper deals with the day-to-day running of his empire.”_

_Steve nodded. So he needed to get into the good graces of Pepper if he wanted to accomplish anything in this ghetto. That was important to know. Pepper's approval might even carry more weight than Tony's, if past life experience was anything to judge by. Steve knew plenty of people who were far more vital to the process of running things than the people they worked beneath—just look at the contrast between the citizens of New Versailles and the workers in the the sprawling ghettos that surrounded the shinning, isolated city._

“ _Happy Hogan is Tony's bodyguard and driver.”_

 _Steve balked. Tony had a driver? Cars were expensive, a rare commodity that sometimes multiple households would pool their resources for, if there was a pressing need for several people in the family to travel consistently. Ultimately, public transport was far more prevalent. For Tony Stark to not only have a personal car, but a_ driver _for that car was the height of decadence._

_Bobbi kept talking, oblivious to Steve's silent indignation at Tony Stark's extravagance. “Happy isn't a decision-maker, but he will be keeping an eye on you, looking into your background, that sort of thing. Just don't give him a reason to think you're a threat.” Bobbi looked Steve and Sam up and down. “Maybe try and... look shorter.”_

The silver-grey material of Sam's shirt looked almost charcoal with the amount of moisture that had seeped into it this morning. The scarf he wrapped around his ears to hide his own prosthetic—cochlear implants—was keeping the worst of the sweat from his face, much to Steve's jealousy. They were going to make a terrible first impression, Steve fretted. He tugged on his red gloves nervously.

No use worrying about that, now. Bobbi could only keep them at her safe house for so long. Steve needed to make contact with Stark now, and find out if they had use for each other or not. Only once he got on answer on that could Steve start planing further ahead, like permanent lodgings in this ghetto, or transportation back to his home. _My home that I'm a fugitive from_ , Steve's internal monologue helpfully reminded him. Right. Making contact with Stark: that was all that was left to him, at this point.

Tugging resolutely at his gloves one more time and replacing his cap, Steve nodded. “Let's go.”

The streets were already filling up as Sam and Steve started across them, people going about their day to day lives: buying food, clothes, bits and bobs of technology they needed to keep on living. A pack of children raced past Steve in tatty skirts and shorts, patched-up bags slung over backs and shoulders. Presumably the group was on their way to school, what little they were allowed to have by the legislators in New Versailles who decided those sorts of things. Steve stopped for a moment, watching as a little pale girl with long black hair shoved at a darker boy with short cropped black hair, laughing and calling out insults to him as she ran away. The boy gave chase, and then the group was gone, rushed off around a corner.

Straightening his shoulders and jutting his chin up, Steve looked up at the awning covering the entrance to Stark's main office. His symbol decorated the front, no other adornments or signage needed: just that industrial strike mark, like a square root or long division symbol slanted inwards. That symbol which adorned many a box of black market supplies, prices marked up exorbitant amounts. Supplies people needed to live; supplies that Stark was making a literal fortune on. Steve looked back down the corner where the kids had disappeared around. He was doing this for them. If there was even a chance Stark could help him, Steve would take it. For the kids who deserved something better than... all of this.

Sam and Steve climbed the steps Bobbi had pointed out to them last night, the ones that supposedly led to Stark's main office above his drugstore. In front of the door they came to a stop. A young black man, roughly the same age as Sam and Steve, though built more leanly, was standing in front. Silently Steve swore. Bobbi hadn't mentioned this man. He wasn't Happy, who was, according to Bobbi, a white man with broad shoulders and brunette hair, and he _certainly_ wasn't Miss Potts. Unless there was something very peculiar about Miss Potts that Bobbi had failed to mention.

“Good morning,” the man greeted them, no actual welcoming tone present in his voice.

Steve looked the man up and down, not bothering to hide his assessing. Even though he was leaner than Steve or Sam, he was a well-built man, and just as tall as the both of them. Steve wouldn't mind having him on his side in a fight, even if he did feel confident that between himself and Sam, they could take him. He wore a fitted shirt and cargo pants, like Sam and Steve wore, with a light jacket over it. Steve had a feeling that jacket hid some kind of weapon, defensive or otherwise. Maybe a prosthetic enhancement of some sort. There was no way this was a Stark man standing outside his office without some protective implements on him.

“Name's Steve Rogers,” Steve finally offered up. Honesty was probably the best policy, at this point. Not like Stark was going to get him into any more trouble than he was already in. “This is my friend Sam Wilson. We're here to see Mr. Stark.”

The man looked down at Steve's extended hand, then took it and shook, after a moment. “Is that so?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.

Steve nodded. “That's so. Now, I hate to be so direct-” Next to him, Sam snorted. “But are you going to let us in to see him, or are you going to collect me some stationary so I can leave a note?”

The man's face broke into a grin, revealing startlingly white teeth. Steve wondered if that was a prosthetic or just a side effect of working with Tony Stark: tons of money, access to all the most extravagant technologies, and great dental. “No need for that. I'll take you in.” The man turned to the door and rapped twelve times in a sequence that seemed familiar to Steve, though he couldn't place it. Maybe some math thing he had been taught years ago in “school”, then forgot in lieu of bigger concerns. “Name's James Rhodes, by the way,” the man introduced himself as they stood outside the closed door and waited. “But everyone calls me 'Rhodey'.”

The door opened as Rhodey smiled back at them, then stepped inside. Steve glanced over at Sam, just once, to catch his eye. Sam gave him a nod. Okay. That was that, then. With a deep breath, Steve stepped over the threshold and into the proverbial lion's den.

Stark's office was a surprise. Far from the dingy, seedy, dimly-lit den of corruption Steve had expected it to be, the office was clean and neat, decorated in a spartan but modern design aesthetic. Sharp metal lines, glass and steel, made up the bulk of the furniture occupying the space. Not to mention it was the best-lit indoor space Steve had ever been in, besides the storeroom in New Versailles, during those tense minutes when Baron Zemo first walked in and turned on the lights. Steve peered curiously up at the ceiling, but oddly enough he couldn't spot any light bulbs or gas lamps anywhere.

“It's an ambient light with a dispersal function running on it,” a voice called out. Steve startled and brought his attention back to the room in front of him.

A smartly-dressed man was sitting behind a desk. The dark lines of his suit were cut so sharp and so clean they almost looked like a extension of the steel desk in front of him. The goatee that framed his mouth was just as sharp and dark. That, coupled with the electric blue glow emanating from somewhere in the center of the man's chest, lent him an almost mechanical aura.

“Tony Stark,” the man said in greeting, at the same time Steve's mind was supplying him with the name.

“Steve Rogers.” Steve started forward to extend his hand in greeting, only to be stopped by a burly man with brunette hair. This must be Happy Hogan.

“Alright, pal: that's far enough. Keep it in your pants.”

Steve bristled at the lewd turn of phrase, but brought his hand back to himself and said nothing. To get to Stark, you had to get passed Happy and Pepper. No use alienating the man from the start just because Steve didn't care for his sense of humor.

Instead, Steve nodded at Happy and put on his most sincere face. “Sorry, Mr. Hogan. I didn't know. This is my... associate, Sam Wilson.” Steve then turned and focused his attention on the other person in the room: a pale red-headed woman, thin like a beanpole. She must be naturally that way—surely Stark would keep his closest employees well-fed.

“And you must be Miss Potts?” Steve asked. “It's a pleasure to meet you as well, ma'am. I've heard a lot about you.”

Miss Potts didn't seem impressed by Steve's greeting. Her eyes narrowed at him. Dryly she asked him: “Let me guess: all good things?”

Steve shrugged. “If you don't want to be a cliche, maybe stop doing such good work.”

Pepper's eyes stayed narrowed at Steve, but he thought he saw maybe a glimmer of amusement there. He could only hope.

“Alright, alright,” Stark interrupted the exchange. “Tall, blonde, and handsome and his friend dark chocolate are here to see _me_ , not you management rejects.” Pepper snorted, causing Stark to hold up his hands apologetically. “Okay, so maybe I'm the management reject out of the two of us, Pep has a point. But isn't half of management knowing your weaknesses and delegating responsibility to those more capable than you?”

“Yes, but the other half is actually being able to manage,” Pepper shot back. “Sir,” she added belatedly.

“Alright, alright. Thanks for showing me so much respect in front of the greenies,” Stark grumbled good-naturedly. He then pushed himself up from his chair and walked around his desk, just to lean back against it.

“Steve, right? You got a good eye.” Stark made a gesture that somehow indicated the sourceless light that filled the room. “You an engineer?”

Steve shook his head. “No. Not so much a steady hand with technology myself,” Steve admitted. “I just-” Steve wasn't sure how much he wanted to admit to this Stark. He noticed the light source, or lack of one, because he had been interested in art as a child—before life took away such fruitless dreams. Before he had put down brush and pencil, however, Steve had learned to look for light sources, to think about where the light in a painting or sketch was coming from. To have a room with this kind of omniscient light was noticeable. “Got an eye for spotting differences, I guess.” Steve shrugged. “And the light in here is definitely different.”

Stark hummed to himself. He seemed pleased, though Steve couldn't fathom as to why. Stark was a goods dealer, a smuggler, a distributor of black market goods in the highest order. Not to mention probably the best engineer outside the walls of New Versailles—and maybe even inside them, if some of the more outlandish rumors about him and his origins were true.

“So, Steve Rogers...” Stark glanced over at Sam, shooting him an almost apologetic grin. “And Sam Wilson. What brings you to me?”

“My friend, Doctor Erskine, seems to think I have something of value to offer you,” Steve explained.

Stark's eyes roved up and down Steve's body before settling on his face. “And what might that be?” Stark asked with a grin.

Steve shrugged. “Beats me.”

Stark laughed, sharp and quick. Behind his right shoulder, Pepper's eyes were narrowed at Steve, assessing and critical. Happy's were the same, over Stark's left shoulder, but it was obvious the two of them were seeing Steve as posing two very different kinds of threats.

“Well, let's see.” Stark pushed himself off from his desk, stepping up a hair's breadth from where Steve stood. Now that he was so close, it was obvious how much shorter Stark was than Steve, a good four or five inches, probably. Still, he had that kind of presence that filled the room, filled up a city block, even.

Stark's grin was sly and calculating, eyes skimming over Steve's body like fingers skittering across his chest. Steve forced himself to breathe nice and steady, not letting on any nervousness or weakness. Not letting Tony Stark think he had an upper hand, even if this was his territory and Steve was here basically as a beggar.

Stark's grin turned a touch sharper, maybe at Steve's lack of a reaction, maybe at something else he saw. He moved around Steve, circling him like a tiger Steve had seen once on a digital film. When he was behind Steve, out of his line of sight, Stark thought out loud: “You don't have a possession to your name, do you.” It was a rhetorical question, so Steve didn't answer it.

Coming up on his right side, Stark “accidentally” bumped his arm into Steve's. Steve didn't flinch, just kept looking ahead. Pepper was still watching him carefully, a knowing look in her eyes. Happy seemed more concerned with how close Stark was getting to the potential threat that Steve was.

A tug on his gloved hand as Stark came back around to his front. Steve flinched, just a little, out of nerves. Stark grinned and tugged at his hand some more, pulling it up to lace his fingers between Steve's. “What size gloves you wear, big guy?”

Steve rolled his eyes. This Stark was every inch the sleazeball the rumors made him out to be. But Steve knew a serious question when he heard it, even if it was buried beneath sarcasm and flirting.

“If you'd give me my hand back, I could show you myself.” Steve hadn't meant it to sound that... sexy. He blinked and fought down a blush when Stark's expression brightened in shock, bubble of surprised laughter escaping his lips.

“Well then by all means.” Stark released Steve's hand and backed up. “Do show.”

Steve sighed and ducked his head, ostensibly to focus on removing his gloves. Mostly he was trying to refocus himself, to remember why Tony Stark was so dangerous, with that wicked tongue and twinkling eyes of his.

Shoving his gloves into his pocket, Steve carefully held out his hands palm-first towards Stark. Happy jumped forward immediately, though Stark seemed unfazed: peering at the contact points in Steve's palm with an almost child-like open curiosity.

“Boss!” Happy shouted.

Steve sighed and pointed his palms up, to the ceiling. “Nothing happens unless they touch,” he explained, more to Happy than to Stark. “I have to bring my palms together to activate them.”

“Hence the gloves,” Stark supplied. He looked like he already known, like he had figured it all out even before Steve took off the gloves. And maybe he had: maybe, like the rumors about Stark's loose morals, the rumors about Stark's genius engineering intellect were also true. Steve glanced over at Stark, meeting his eyes. Stark met them right back, smile still quirking at his lips, though more quietly, more genuinely than before.

“Let's see it,” Stark ordered with a nod. “We good in here? We need to go outside, somewhere with more room?”

Steve shook his head. He wasn't so good at controlling it, only having used it a half-dozen times in his life, but every time he had, it started small: just a shield in front of himself and nothing else. Hopefully this time would be no different.

Stark was watching him with baited breath, standing just in front of his desk. Happy looked ready to pounce, Pepper to grab some hard drives and run. But Stark was watching him, smiling, waiting. Steve kept eyes on him as he brought his palms down, and then brought them together.

A flash of light, as always. Glowing gold, spreading out from Steve's palms, covering his body. Steve stopped it there, focusing hard. No need to push it out, to defend himself. The gold stayed in front of him, his own personal shield coalescing into a solid state, a circle of perfect protection sliding between him and Stark.

On the other side of the golden halo that Steve was behind, Stark's expression brightened, eyes darting around the shield excitedly. He made a move to step forwards, causing Steve to balk, dropping his palms away from each other and extinguishing the shield. He didn't know what would happen if Stark tried to touch his shield—had never had anyone do that when Steve wasn't actively trying to defend himself. Better safe than sorry—better cautious than electrocuting, or worse, the very guy Steve was trying to endear himself to.

Steve shook his fingers out nervously, palms itching psychosomatically. Happy's eyes were wide with shock over Stark's shoulder; Pepper's expression was more controlled, but no less impressed. Of course, it was Stark's expression that really took the cake: all wondering and happy, like a kid seeing their first light show, or a mother getting a real live tin of vegetables that Steve had managed to sneak out of New Versailles.

“What is it?” Stark asked, breaking the almost reverential silence that had fallen over the room.

Steve eyed Stark curiously, wondering if this was a test. “You don't have it all figured out?”

Stark smiled slyly. “Maybe. But I'm curious as to what you _think_ it is.”

Steve wiped his palms on his pants before tugging his gloves back on, stalling for time. He was no engineer, and he knew his answer would reveal that. Still, he knew the basics of what his shield was, in a laymen sort of way at least.

“It's a... a Schrödinger shield,” Steve started. He rubbed his gloves hands together, cracking his knuckles nervously. “At least, that's what Doc Erskine called it. It's... it's light. The composition of it. I'm able to manipulate it because it... takes advantage of some law in quantum physics, having to do with light. For some reason, light is both a wave and a particle at the same time. And my shield uses that. Uh. Makes it into a wave to make it malleable, make it so I can change its shape. But then I can make it solid, into a shield, because it's particles, too. I'm... not sure how I do that.”

Stark waved his hand, like he didn't need to hear how Steve was able to manipulate his shield of light. Stark probably knew, somehow: knew more than Steve would ever know about how his own technology worked.

“It's a handy trick, I bet.”

Steve's eyes narrowed. He wasn't sure if he liked Stark calling his shield a “trick”. It was a heck of a lot more than that, and had saved his life more than once. Best trick on the planet, if that was all it was. In Steve's opinion, at least.

Before Steve could do something stupid like defend his shield, Stark turned his attention to Sam. “And what about you?” Stark asked. “What have you got to offer me?”

Sam glanced over at Steve. Steve shrugged. He didn't know if his little “audition” had gone well with Stark, or if that had anything to do with asking Sam about any special abilities he might have. Steve had no insight into the mind of this man—no more than Sam did, certainly.

Best bet was for them to be completely open with Stark. They had nothing left to lose, after all. Sam shrugged and, seemingly agreeing with Steve's thoughts, undid the scarf from his head. His prosthetic was hardly as noticeable as Steve's or Clint's, but it still needed to be covered, just in case.

Sam pointed at his ears, tilting his head so Stark could peer inside. “Cochlear implants,” Sam explained. “Not so I can hear—I'm not deaf without them. They plug me into my Redwing network.”

“Redwing network?” Stark prompted. He had a hand on Sam's shoulder, peering into his ears. Steve suppressed an irrational urge to shove Stark's hand off Sam's shoulder and waited, patiently. Stark stepped back of his own volition after a moment listening carefully to Sam's explanation.

“It's a nanobot swarm I've got, spread through anywhere they can reach.”

“New Versailles?” Stark asked with eyebrows raised.

Sam shook his head, mouth twisting slightly. “Can't. Some kind of... well, I don't know what. Electronic shield. But I can't get in.”

Stark shook his head. “It's a low-level EM field surrounding the city—like a constant EMP.” He glanced over at Steve, eyes contemplative. “Your 'shield' still works inside the mist, doesn't it?”

Steve blinked. He had never thought of that, but- “Yeah,” Steve replied. “Yeah, it does.”

Stark nodded. “Quantum tech. Makes sense.” Conspicuously Stark started tapping on the blue glow in his chest, fingers drumming contemplatively. Steve filed that little piece of information away for later. Never knew when it might come in handy—especially since he didn't know if Stark was going to kick the two of them out into the cold, just yet.

Stark nodded, eyes narrowed at Sam. “Care to demonstrate?”

Sam shrugged. “It's not really as impressive as Steve's firework display,” he cautioned, though his head was already tilting to the side the way it did when he was “listening” to his Redwing network. “Uh, there's a shipment coming into this ghetto right now. Supplies from New Versailles. Protein packs, mush bread, standard rations. Two guys are picking it up: white guy, blonde hair,” he glanced over at Steve, “kinda looks like Clint, without the eyes. Hair's a little longer, too.” Sam looked away as he went back to listening to Redwing. “Other guy's built like a brick shit-house. Shaved head, goatee.”

Stark was smirking. “Luke and Danny. They're mine.”

Sam shot Stark a sly look. “Figured they would be. Why you think I picked them to hone in on?”

Stark laughed approvingly at that, and Steve felt something inside him start to consider unknotting. This was good. Stark approved of Sam's abilities, he'd managed to impress the slumlord. Steve wasn't sure if his display had been quite so... pragmatically useful. But it was all he had. Steve had told Erskine he didn't think Stark had any use for him in the first place. Thank goodness Sam had insisted on tagging along.

“You're useful,” Stark said decisively, looking at Sam. His eyes slid sideways back to Steve, taking him in. “You're cute.”

Steve glowered.

“You both can stick around,” Stark declared, like a benevolent god handing down a positive judgement upon a pair of mere mortals. Steve's glower deepened.

“I'll have Rhodey set you two up, get you some digs,” Stark continued, oblivious to Steve's annoyance. “Rogers.” Steve blinked, refocusing on Stark.

“Yes?”

Stark was eyeing him up and down, like a piece of meat. Well, _shit_. They'd all warned him, hadn't they? Steve pressed his lips together in a tight line and waited.

“After Rhodey gets you two settled in, why don't you swing back by here tonight? Your friend Doctor Erskine might be smarter than you give him credit for. I'd like a chance to pump you for information.”

It didn't have to be innuendo, what Stark was saying. Steve narrowed his eyes, trying to read the expression on Stark's face. But for a man with such an expressive visage, it was suddenly unreadable: polite, smiling, but ultimately an enigma.

“Will do,” Steve replied curtly. It wasn't like he couldn't handle himself. If Stark wanted something Steve wasn't willing to give, Steve wasn't going to give it. Simple as that. The fact of the matter was, Steve still had no idea what good Erskine thought he could do Stark—or vice versa, for that matter. Steve needed to pursue every lead he had, even if one of those leads was a dinner invitation with the most notorious slumlord and smuggler there was.

Sam was gonna give him so much shit over this later. Steve bit down on a sigh.

“Rhodey.” Stark's voice was suddenly sharp, commanding. Even Steve hesitated, turning back to look at Stark, waiting on him. Stark's eyes were on his man Rhodey's, communicating something silently with him. After a moment Rhodey nodded, turning back to Steve and Sam.

“Come on,” Rhodey nodded at the door. “Let's get you two somewhere to put your heads.”

Steve's eyes stayed on Stark for a moment, watching him even as Rhodey was bustling them out the door. Stark's hand was drumming at his chest, at that glowing blue network of lines criss-crossing his skin, coming together in the center. His eyes caught Steve's, and the drumming stopped, hand dropping down. He winked at Steve, grin bright and vicious. Steve tried not to scowl but didn't think he succeeded, judging by the way Stark's smile grew. Quickly Steve turned away to Rhodey, before he gave Stark something else to laugh at.

Rhodey led the two of them out of Stark's main office, down the stairs and out onto the hot, busy streets. Steve felt like he started to sweat again the second his feet touched the dusty road. He sighed and wiped at his face with one gloved hand, resolutely trudging after Rhodey as he expertly made his way through the crowd.

“Where were you guys staying before?” Rhodey asked them as they walked.

Steve and Sam glanced at each other. Were they supposed to reveal something like that? Then again, if Stark's reputation was even a percentage true, he knew about the network of safehouses Clint utilized. Especially the ones that worked out of his own ghetto.

“Bobbi's,” Steve said after a moment. “She's a friend of a friend.”

“Clint Barton, right?” Rhodey asked. “That's the friend?” He glanced back and grinned reassuringly. He nodded at Sam. “You said his name in there when you were describing Danny. I've never met Clint, but anyone who's seen the both of them makes the comparison between them. Clint's good people.” Rhodey turned to face ahead of him again, cutting down an alleyway to their right. Steve and Sam followed close on his heels. “Tony wouldn't let him or his people operate in this ghetto if he didn't think so—or if he didn't think Clint was good business,” Rhodey amended the last bit.

Steve pressed his lips together. His estimation of Stark wasn't growing any thanks to Rhodey's talk. It seems all the rumors about him were true: he was vain, he was selfish, and he was a lech. He had a certain amount of charm to him, that much was true as well. But all the charm and good looks in the world were no cover for a rotten soul. In Steve's opinion, at least.

Maybe ten, fifteen minutes of fast walking through the busy streets of Stark's ghetto and Rhodey came to a stop before a halfway-decent looking apartment building. Steve squinted up, counting the stories. Fifteen. He sure hoped it was one of those rare ones with an elevator. If not for his sake, but for the sake of the parents and elderly that surely occupied it.

Rhodey strode straight up to the front door of the complex, pressing something against a panel to the right of the door. A click of a lock, and Rhodey was tugging the door open easily.

As Steve followed Rhodey in, Sam just behind him, Rhodey didn't make to pass over whatever he had pressed against the door panel. Steve frowned. Didn't he need to give them a key, or something? A keycard, maybe, if Tony was insisting on being high-tech?

But Rhodey kept walking forward, to an unexpected elevator just inside the main doors of the apartment. Steve couldn't help looking around like a tourist, peering at the button Rhodey pressed and then marveling at the doors as they opened for them. He kind of wanted to peer down between the doors, see what he could see of the elevator shaft at the seam of elevator and ground floor threshold, but Steve forced himself to step over the line without pausing _too_ long to crane his neck down.

“Impressed?” Rhodey asked knowingly.

Steve thought about denying it as he settled into the little box with Sam. But Rhodey seemed like a more decent fellow than his boss Stark, and it wasn't like his experience was _unusual_. “Never been in one before,” Steve admitted. “There's not a single one in our ghetto.”

Rhodey nodded as he jabbed at a button—twelve, Steve took note—no judgement in his expression. “I hadn't either, when I first came here. I don't think there was one in the whole town before Stark showed up. In five years, he'd financed and built a dozen of these apartments all around the city.”

The hum of the elevator around them was basically silent, the acceleration so smooth it wasn't even noticeable. Steve marveled at the technology. “Where's he get the power for this stuff?” he asked. He glanced over at Rhodey again, whose expression suddenly shut down.

“Trade secret.”

Steve shrugged. Knowing Stark (even if it was mostly just from rumor and gossip), Steve wouldn't have been able to understand the technical explanation of whatever magical energy powered his products. It couldn't be wood, or even coal. And his lights certainly weren't gas or oil lights. Nuclear power was a possibility, though Steve couldn't fathom where he'd get the uranium or whatever elements that stuff took. No: Stark had access to something else entirely, something in a whole other _league_ from the tech Steve was used to.

And back in Steve's ghetto, the people were getting by on energy stamps, a few pitiful hours every week that the government in New Versailles allotted them. The hospital in their ghetto had to get by on hand-pump respirators, for God's sake. And Tony Stark had a dozen elevators running in his ghetto. It was greedy, was what it was. And it lent more credence to the rumors that Stark was a former citizen of New Versailles, coming down to the lower ghetto to make a quick buck, or set himself up as king of the paupers.

“Hope you guys don't mind sharing a single,” Rhodey apologized as they stepped off the elevator. The hallway was dimly lit, not like Stark's offices, but still a sight better than anything Steve had ever lived in. Steve wondered if these were luxury apartments for the wealthy, or Stark's personal guests. Surely they were meant to impress: the electric elevators and constant lighting.

Stopping in front of a door, Rhodey swiped his hand in front of the lock, again palming whatever keycard or RFID card or something that opened the lock. Steve squinted, trying to get a glimpse of the technology, but couldn't catch sight of anything before the mechanism inside the door was clicking and the door swung open.

“We just don't have the space to give you guys your own places.” Rhodey laughed as he stepped inside, letting Steve and Sam come in after him. “Looks like you'll have to make do with the old sock-on-the-door handle thing if you want some alone time.”

Whatever Rhodey was being friendly chatting away about washed right over Steve as he stepped inside the apartment, mouth falling open. It was... it was a _luxury_ apartment. It was... Steve had only caught glimpses of this kind of decadence, buried behind schematic diagrams for buildings in New Versailles.

There was a separate kitchen, off to the right. A stove, and an oven, and a sink. Steve wanted to rush over and make sure the sink had running water, but of course it did, it must, because the whole apartment had _electricity_ . Lights overhead that flickered and were maybe a little bit old, but still _worked_. And, centerpiece of the whole kitchen: a refrigerator. Steve's eyes teared up. God, a refrigerator in a single apartment. What he wouldn't give to have just one per block back home, instead of the one per dozen blocks like they got by on.

Directly in front of them, off the side of the kitchen, was a small kitchenette, complete with a little round table that fit three, maybe four if they really squeezed in there. Then there was a desk and a whole workstation, bits and bobs that Steve probably had no idea what to do with already set up nice and neat across the surface. There were two monitors, a couple keypads, and an ethernet and phone system all identifiable across the surface, not to mention all the items Steve had no clue about.

And then, in _addition_ to all this, there was a bedroom. A single bed, but actually lifted off the floor, for some reason. The mattress that was sitting atop the bed frame was thicker than Steve's thigh. This wasn't a bed: this was some kind of resting place for angels.

“We can't accept this.” The words slipped from Steve's mouth before he thought of them, but once they were out he didn't feel any need to take them back. They _couldn't_ accept this, that was right: they'd never be able to repay Stark for this kind of luxury, not if they worked for him for their whole lives. And Steve had no interest in taking on a debt he couldn't pay back— _especially_ when the one he'd be indebted to was Tony Stark.

Rhodey glanced around the room, like he was trying to see it from their point of view. “You guys are from the north, right? An hour outside New Versailles' north-east walls?” Steve nodded mutely. Rhodey frowned, glancing down at the floor. It was carpeted. Steve wanted to lie down and press his face into it, feel the softness against his own skin. He could already feel the difference in his back and feet, even with heavy boots on.

“I've been there. To your home town. I know this probably seems like too much, but trust me: it's not.”

“Stark doesn't even have use for us,” Steve pointed out. He glanced over at Sam and twisted his mouth. “Well, use for _me_. As far as he knows, I'm a pretty face with a shield.”

Rhodey shook his head. “Trust me: Tony doesn't bring in anyone he thinks is useless. He's got a plan for you.”

Steve flushed and opened up his mouth to protest, but Rhodey got to it first, laughing and shaking his head.

“And I don't mean it like _that_ , even if Tony's playing up his playboy card right now. Trust me, you don't build an empire like Tony's built in the last ten years by letting yourself get distracted by every pretty face that walks through the door.”

Rhodey turned back to the apartment and pointed to a door just off the bedroom. “Bathroom's in there. Shower timer is five minutes twice a day. You'll have figure out who goes when yourself. Or share.”

Steve balked. Racing forward, Sam was already at his side, tugging open the bathroom door. Sure enough, there was a toilet, a sink... and a shower. A whole, real, shower. Steve was lucky he got a _bath_ once every day, much less a _shower_. God, the waste!

“Again: it's not uncommon, here,” Rhodey cautioned them. Steve and Sam turned around to face Rhodey, who was standing a respectful distance away in the bedroom. “Don't think it's lap of luxury or anything. All the Stark apartments have one.”

Shaking himself, Steve forced his mind back onto the important things. Stark probably figured they'd get distracted by all the luxury around them, all the amenities they weren't used to. Steve had to make sure he wasn't taken advantage of, even if this apartment was nice enough to house a block of families from his home ghetto.

“What about a keycard?” Steve asked. “Are we supposed to rely on you to let us in and out?” It was a theory that had occurred to Steve when Sam failed to be forthcoming about how he was opening the doors to the building and their apartment. Perhaps Stark planned on keeping them on a short leash, only allowed in and out according to his say, with one of his people there to open doors—or close them.

But Rhodey smiled easily and shook his head, and Steve tried not to feel embarrassed about how his negative theories about Stark kept getting disproven almost as soon as he thought them up.

“Naw, no, man. Just an implant. Figured I'd wait for you guys to toss down your stuff before I started stabbing you.” As he spoke Rhodey pulled out a syringe with a thick needle on the end and waved it around.

Right. That made sense: Stark wouldn't use something as easily stolen as a keycard or honest-to-goodness tumbler-turning key. Of course, it escalated breaking-and-entering up to “brutal amputation”, at minimum, but Steve wasn't too worried about himself or Sam getting picked off that way. It also made anyone who lived in a Stark apartment a violator of the anti-prosthetic laws, in a small way but still to the letter of the law. Again, not really a concern for Steve and Sam, considering they'd get busted for much bigger violations if a sentinel ever scanned them over good for prosthetic enhancements.

Sam went first, holding out his hand to Rhodey palm-up, while Steve set about removing his right glove. “Will it interfere with my prosthetic?” Steve asked.

Rhodey shrugged as he squinted at Sam's hand, tongue poking out the side of his mouth as he pressed the needle in, then depressed the plunger. A small grunt escaped his lips and his face scrunched up uncomfortably, but then it was over, Rhodey releasing his hand and stepping away and Sam taking his hand back, flexing it experimentally.

“Damn, I don't even feel it,” Sam commented. “Not bad.”

“I don't know anything about the ID implants, or your shield-majig,” Rhodey admitted to Steve. “But Tony sent me out with two of these, and he was the guy who invented them in the first place. If there was going to be a problem, he would have said something.”

Steve frowned, hand flexing contemplatively as he eyed the second syringe Rhodey was holding up. Glancing over at Sam, he asked: “Redwing?”

Sam cocked his head, but almost instantly he was shrugging and shaking his head. “Can hear it just fine. Whole network's up: no interference.”

Steve glanced at the syringe again. He couldn't help but be suspicious of an implant Stark wanted to inject into his body—if anything, Steve felt like he was justified in his concern. But Sam's prosthetic seemed to be working fine, and Stark had honestly given them no reason to distrust him, yet. It was only his reputation that had done that.

Coming to a decision, Steve nodded and held out his hand, palm-up as Rhodey had. The white contact point in his palm caught the light in the apartment, star in the center shinning faintly, like a pale imitation of the real thing. Rhodey took his hand carefully in his own, steadying it as he aimed the needle. He injected the implant into the fatty heel of Steve's palm, below the shield contact point. It was uncomfortable for a second, a painful bit of tearing, but then the pain was gone and all that was left was a tiny pinprick of blood. Steve pressed his thumb over the little spot, staunching the blood flow. He could feel the implant beneath his skin: just a little imperfection under there, felt only if you were looking for it.

At least if there was one thing Stark's reputation and Steve's experiences with the man agreed upon so far, it was that he was an engineering genius. That was one thing Steve could be certain of.

Rhodey packed away the syringes with a smile and nodded at the two men. “Alright, well. If there's nothing else, I'll let you two get settled. Cabinets and 'fridge are fully stocked—all part of the standard move-in package for a Stark apartment.” Rhodey winked. “Tomorrow morning someone will come by to set you guys up some more: job placement, full fake IDs, that sort of thing. Do you know how to get back to the office?” That last part was directed at Steve. He flushed, remember his promised dinner that night with Stark.

“Yes.” Steve was good with streets and directions. His memory was near-perfect for stuff like that. A fifteen minute walk down some streets in a strange city was no where near close enough to tax his route memory.

Rhodey shrugged. “Alright then. Tony'll be expecting you around seven. Don't worry if you're late—he always is. And if you get lost and do end up needing directions, ask anyone. Stark doesn't exactly keep a low profile around here.”

“I never would have guessed, with how he seems to stick his name on everything he builds,” Steve said sarcastically.

Rhodey laughed and shrugged. “What can I say? Guy's got an ego and isn't afraid who knows it. Only thing with him is: he actually deserves to have an ego the size he does. Just don't let him know I ever said that.” Rhodey said the last part _sotto voce_ , like he was afraid of Stark overhearing. Briefly Steve wondered if he should be worried about bugs in their new apartment. He'd deal with that later.

With everything packed up and Steve and Sam injected and ready to go, Rhodey headed for the door. When he got to the threshold, however, Rhodey stopped and turned around. His face had suddenly dropped the friendly, joking expression it had worn before, to be replaced by something more serious, more protective.

“Just...” Rhodey hesitated at the entranceway, shuffling his feet as he struggled to find the right words. Finally he nodded his head toward the window, indicating the city outside their walls. “When I was a kid, first growing up here? This place was as bad as bad could get. As poor and run down as where you're from, but with four times the population and ten times the amount of thieves and murderers. It was a mess.” Rhodey rubbed a hand through his short-cropped hair. “When Tony showed up years ago, I thought the same thing as you: he's some asshole from New Versailles, here to profit off our sweat and tears even worse than before. But... I mean, I'm not saying he isn't living good. He is. But he's making everybody _else_ living good, too. Crime—crime that isn't Tony's—is down to record lows. Standard of living is sky high, second only to inside New Versailles. The same thing that kept us so poor and overrun with violence and corruption before, our distance from New Versailles, is what's keeping us under the radar now, letting us enjoy this golden age Tony threw us into.”

“I'll keep that in mind,” Steve promised. And he meant it—but that didn't mean he was going to trust Stark and his methods just yet. There was a lot of work to do, work that shouldn't be profited over. Food, water, shelter, an education: these were the things the people needed. Not just one group of people, not just one ghetto. _Everybody_ deserved to have those basic needs met, no matter who they were or where they lived. Even those people outside Stark's sphere of influence, even those people who hadn't proved themselves useful to Stark in one way or another. Stark might have done a lot for the people in his town, but Steve wasn't convinced he was doing enough, and he _certainly_ didn't trust that he was doing it for the right reasons.

Rhodey shut the door behind him as he left, bolt softly clicking shut behind him. Steve glanced around the luxurious apartment, suddenly at a loss of what to do with all this freedom.

“Well?” Sam asked. Laughing, he threw himself onto the bed, bouncing up and down violently. Steve stared, open-mouthed, at the firmness of the springs. “Which side of the bed do you want?”

Steve laughed and tossed his rucksack down, then finally allowed himself to give into his desire from earlier: he laid himself down on the floor and rubbed his face on the carpet. It was scratchy, and maybe an eighth of an inch thick, but it was _carpet._

“Hell, I'll take the floor if you wanted me to,” Steve said. “This carpet's thicker than the mattress I've been sleeping on the past five years.”

“That's because your Erskine-induced growth spurt squished your old mattress thinner than a fiber optics cable,” Sam pointed out from up on the bed. He peered down at Steve, elbows propping him up on his stomach. “Poor thing never stood a chance.”

Abruptly Steve pushed himself upright, stumbling in his haste. Rhodey had mentioned a fully-stocked refrigerator, and cabinets. Steve wanted to see-

Steve gasped, reeling backwards as he opened the 'fridge. When Rhodey had said “fully stocked”, he had been picturing something like what his house looked like after a raid of the New Versailles storeroom: enough canned goods to last him a month, a half-serving with each meal. This was... The sight that greeted Steve from the refrigerator was beyond anything he could have imagined. This must be what living in New Versailles was like.

Every shelf was full. Full! _Every. Shelf._ Steve reached in with shaking hands, picking at the groceries. There was milk. Where had Stark gotten milk? Was it cow milk? Unscrewing the cap on the bottle, Steve sniffed at the milk. It smelled good. Unspoiled. Hesitantly Steve took a drink.

It was like tasting the secret ambrosia that was only allowed to touch the lips of the people of New Versailles. Steve closed his eyes and took a long gulp, holding it in his mouth, swirling it around with his tongue. He swallowed it incrementally, reluctant to let it go. After a long moment, once he swallowed the last drop of milk, Steve opened his eyes again.

Whatever Stark wanted with him tonight, Steve suddenly had a heck of a good motivation for helping him out. Steve just had to convince him to distribute such healthy goodness to everyone, not just those people Stark could keep securely under his thumb. Whatever tactics he needed to use, whatever arguments he needed to make, Steve was willing to try for the rest of his life to get Stark to distribute milk to ever hungry kid in the ghettos outside New Versailles. Every child deserved a sip of that heaven Steve had just imbibed.

“Holy shit.” Sam's voice behind Steve, his footsteps entering the kitchen. Steve stepped aside so he could look into the 'fridge.

“He's got bread.” Sam was looking through the cabinets. He pulled out a loaf of wheat bread, shoving it at Steve. Steve's stomach growled. “He's got rice,” Sam continued, rummaging through the cabinet. “And pasta. Holy shit, Steve.”

“I know,” Steve whispered, still dumb-struck and staring at the milk.

“Do you want to make lunch?” Sam asked. [Steve turned to look at him and ended up bursting out laughing](http://everybodyilovedies.tumblr.com/post/98993140922/oh-my-goooshhhh-my-commission). Sam's arms were full of various grain products: cereals and bread and pasta and rice. He looked like a kid on his birthday, or their parents when Steve came to town with packs and packs full of food.

“ _One_ thing,” Steve said, tugging all the products out of Sam's arms and putting them back in the cabinet. “Something with the perishables, while they're still good.”

Sam was crinkling the bread lovingly between his hands, ear turned to it so he could listen to the crust crack. “Something with bread,” Sam insisted.

Steve glanced at the 'fridge. He knew what he was drinking for lunch, no matter what they ended up eating.

Two full bellies later, Steve and Sam were lying in the middle of their apartment, hands roving absently over the carpet beneath their fingertips.

“Well?” Sam finally asked, breaking the contented silence that had fallen over them after lunch. “What's the plan?”

For a long moment Steve thought about that simple question. There were a million different answers to it, a lifetime of plans and strategies, designs and tactics that Steve had come up with over the many years since he had first realized there was something wrong with the world, something he needed to fix. But Sam was asking about the short-term, the _extreme_ short-term. Not what Steve was planning to do about Stark, how he was planning on utilizing his influence and resources. That plan would come once Steve had a better idea as to the exact extent of that influence and those resources.

No, for now, there was only one item on the agenda that Steve could make an action towards.

“Guess I better take a shower,” Steve sighed. He frowned over at Sam. “I've got a dinner date.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you missed it, [zombietonbo](http://www.zombietonbo.tumblr.com/) made some [AMAZING ART](http://everybodyilovedies.tumblr.com/post/98993140922/oh-my-goooshhhh-my-commission) for this chapter!! Please go check it out <3


	4. Survival

 

Steve's hair was almost dry by the time he got to his destination, slight breeze and still-warm setting sun helping the process along on the twenty minute walk to Stark's office. Now that he was standing here, down on the street looking up at Stark's building, Steve wondered if maybe he shouldn't have brought something along with him. Some sort of alcohol off the black market, or even just a jumble of flowers. He wasn't trying to date Stark, but he wasn't exactly against trying to charm the guy. He needed Stark on his side, after all: needed Stark to want to help him. Keeping the attitude in check and laying on just a _little_ bit of that charm he'd been told he has might not be a terrible idea.

Before Steve could turn around and run off in search of some sort of hostess gift, the door on the second floor of Stark's building opened, revealing Miss Potts. She strode out of the door on high platform sandals, eyes sweeping the street below her imperiously. When he eyes alighted on Steve she nodded, then waved him up. Steve didn't have much of a choice but to stomp his way up the bamboo stairs to her.

Well, speaking of charm: now was as good a time as any to give it a go. “How are you this evening, Miss Potts?”

Miss Potts couldn't have looked _less_ charmed by Steve's inquiry. Steve resisted the urge to pout, though he was pretty sure he deflated quite a bit. Making inroads in this ghetto was going to be harder than he thought.

“He'll see you on the roof,” Miss Potts informed him coldly. She turned and led Steve inside without another word, then gestured at a flight of stairs that ostensibly were roof access. Steve got the impression Pepper was used to Stark having her fetch people like Steve for him. Steve swallowed and tried his best to keep his chin up and shoulders back. This was a business dinner. If it wasn't, Steve was leaving. He and Sam could figure out some other way to help feed the people, to undermine New Versailles' cruel rule. Stark might think he held all the cards, but Steve had been doing his not insignificant part without his help all these years. He'd figure something out.

Taking a deep breath, Steve stopped in front of the door which he presumed opened up to the roof. Charming. He could be charming. Stark already seemed to have taken a liking for him, even if it was for all the wrong reasons. Steve just had to prove his value to Stark, now: show him he was worth more than just a pretty face (and Steve still found that odd, that people would think him handsome, after growing up so sickly and small as he had). If Stark had a heart in there, beneath all those pretty blue lines of light, he would be moved to Steve's cause. He had to be. With his shoulders back and chin held high, Steve pushed open the door and stepped foot onto the dusky-lit roof.

He spotted Stark immediately, set up with two tables alongside the edge of the roof, overlooking the city. One table was laid out for dinner for two, as far as Steve could see. The other was filled with covered dinner dishes. Steve had heard about multiple-course meals. He never thought he'd actually eat one himself. He felt guilty just looking at the covered spread he couldn't even see.

The man himself was standing over on the ledge of the building, hands in his pockets and turned away from Steve. His thick hair was stirred by the wind, gently floating around his head like some kind of reverse halo. It was loose, not stuck down with gel like it had been when Steve had seen him this morning. Steve could imagine Stark running his hands through it all day long as he worked, breaking the gel and freeing his hair from its hold—he'd already seen the gesture once or twice during the short amount of time they had spoken that morning. It was almost endearing.

Until Stark turned around and shattered that illusion, wicked grin and gleaming eyes honing in on Steve like a stray dog on a piece of meat. Steve sighed and stepped forward, doing his best to look calm and in control, suppressing his unwarranted but insistent irritation with this man.

“Mr. Rogers. Can I call you Steve? Steve: sit.” Stark strode over to Steve and took his hand, shaking it not-too-firmly. Steve realized after he'd been swept into his seat that Stark knew about the implant, probably assumed the spot on the heel of his hand would still be tender from the injection. He hadn't put too much pressure into his handshake out of consideration for Steve.

Just when Steve was thinking maybe Stark wasn't all bad, he stopped on the other side of the table next to his chair, looking Steve up and down, up and down before he sat.

“Looking gorgeous tonight, Steve. The sunset really makes your skin glow. Best light for you, I think.”

Steve dropped his eyes to the tablecloth, not sure what to say to such an obvious come-on. Was he really expected to reciprocate? Did Stark really only keep him around because he was a pretty face?

“I was hoping we could discuss something like what Doctor Erskine had in mind when he suggested I come see you,” Steve prompted. Stark's smile was knowing, but he didn't force the conversation back in the direction he had been taking it, so Steve counted the change in topic as a success. “I know my prosthetic isn't as useful as something like what Sam's got, and I don't know about tech like you do. But I _have_ been working at getting people the food and medicine they need for a few years now, and I'd like to try and do something like that again.”

Stark's fingers were long and elegant on his water glass, stroking gently at the underside of the globe of glass as he listened to Steve.

“I'd heard as much,” Stark acknowledged. “I'm more in the goods business than the information business myself, but I still have one ear to the ground, just in case.” Stark grinned at Steve over the table. “And the ground had plenty of chatter about you.”

“Like what?” Steve asked, nervous. Though he had no reason to be: everything he had done was good and right.

“You're too good for your own good, for one.” Stark started with. “You've never taken a cut from the produce you bring back to the people, at great risk to yourself.”

“Not like you.” The accusation was out of Steve's mouth before he could stop it.

Stark's eyes hardened, just a little. “No,” he agreed. “Not like me.”

Shit. Stark's expression had lost some of the levity it had started the evening with, looking almost... disappointed? Steve swallowed. So much for charm.

But Stark continued after a moment, apparently brushing the comment aside like so much street grime off his nice suit. “Here: start with an appetizer. I thought maybe, being from the north, you'd be interested in trying some local cuisine.” Stark stood and went over to the table set up next to theirs, picking up a single covered dish and bringing it over to their table. He removed the cover, revealing the most fascinating smell and odd-looking food Steve had ever seen.

Setting the cover aside on the other table, Stark pointed at the food laid out on the plate between them. “It's all seafood, straight from the ocean. Those little apostrophes there are shrimp, these are scallops. Oysters—I'll show you how to eat them, don't try to figure it out on your own—and calamari—that's squid.”

Steve balked at all the new foods, mouth already watering at the smell. “The red?” Steve asked, pointing to a smear of red to the side.

“Marinara sauce. This over here's tartar. Try each. I prefer the marinara myself, but.”

Tentatively Steve picked up one of the ones Stark had called a shrimp, examining a little crunchy end piece. Tony sat back down across from him, grabbing at a shrimp himself. “Don't eat the tail,” he cautioned. “Like this.” Stark demonstrated how to eat the little shrimp, sticking it in his mouth while holding the crunchy end, sucking the meat of the animal out of the tail. He tossed the crunchy bits back down to his plate as he chewed and wiped his fingers on his napkin.

Steve followed suit, rewarded by a delicious, wholly new taste he'd never experienced before. However, as soon as he set the crunchy tail waste down onto his plate, his guilt caught up to him. “These shrimp are so small,” he observed. “Are they really worth harvesting? They don't yield enough meat to feed a person: it would take a half dozen, a dozen to feed someone.”

Stark groaned as he reached for an oyster. “Okay, yes, I'm spoiling you with my ostentatious wealth. Let me do this one time and I swear you can live off tinned vegetables and that mush the government likes to pretend is food that they give out as rations.”

Steve knew he wasn't going to win this battle, so he gave in and reached for an oyster like Stark had. If one evening of overindulgent eating was what it took to get the rest of the world on the road to full bellies, Steve was willing to bite that bullet. Or that shrimp, as the case may be.

“What else do you think you know about me?” Steve asked. He wasn't so vain as to want to hear Stark's opinion of him, or find out what exploits of his had made it into circulation between the gossips. No, Steve was more interested in hearing what Stark knew about him as strategy: trying to figure out why Stark might think he had use for him already, maybe fill in the gaps of his knowledge and reveal his utility to Stark that he might not be aware of. If they were going to work out an arrangement between them, one as “mutually beneficial” as Erskine seemed to think it could be, they needed to lay all their cards on the table. Or as many as they could afford to reveal.

Stark didn't answer right away, instead opting to lift the oyster to his lips. He nodded at Steve. “Follow my lead.”

Steve flushed hard as he watched Stark wrap full lips around the oyster and suck the inside meat out of the hard shell. The obscene slurping noise that accompanied the act didn't help.

Stark was watching him closely as he chewed on his oyster, so Steve hurried to imitate the process. Shell to his mouth, and... Steve slurped, trying to keep the pornographic noises to the minimum. He didn't even come close to succeeding. Stark was grinning as Steve chewed on the meat of the oyster and tossed the shell down on his plate. The shelled sea creature— _crustacean_ , some childhood memory whispered sternly at Steve from the long-forgotten recesses of his mind—was tasty, but again Steve felt guilty over how much effort must have gone into such small piece of meat.

“Have some of the scallops,” Stark gestured as he leaned back in his chair. His fingers tickled at his water glass again as he watched Steve beneath long, dark eyelashes. Steve did his best not to feel too self-conscious and ate. The scallops had a stronger taste than the shrimp and the oyster, and Steve found he liked that. He wondered if these creatures were as small as they were appearing on his plate, like the shrimp and the oysters obviously were, or if they were cut and trimmed into bite-sized pieces. He decided not to ask, to save himself yet another stab of guilt.

“I know you and your friend Bucky used to raid one of the storerooms in New Versailles for food and medical supplies,” Stark said after a moment. Steve glanced over at him. Stark was eyeing him seriously. “I know you hardly ever took anything for yourself, besides the most basic necessities. I heard Bucky's gone, and then a fortnight later you show up on my doorstep. Which tells me that you're looking for help to keep up the business, only you don't know how.” Stark leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Because for some reason you can't go back to doing it the way you did, with a new partner. Why is that? Bucky have a prosthetic that was necessary to the break-in? Something you can't get for Sam?”

Steve blinked, little fork hovering in mid-air in front of his mouth with a scallop trembling on the end of it. “You don't know?”

Tony shook his head. “You just heard what I know.”

Steve thought for a moment. Should he tell Stark everything? Could he trust him?

Did he have a choice?

So Steve laid out how he and Bucky had been getting into the storeroom in New Versailles: their whole entrance plan, exit plan, and everything in between, down to the last helium balloon. He went over the bare bones of what happened to Bucky, giving Stark the cold hard facts and avoiding recounting as many details as he could while still making sure Stark heard all the information essential to forming a full picture.

Stark listened to it all, surprisingly only interjecting to ask for clarifying points. Steve was... well, he was impressed, even though he really shouldn't be. Stark was just showing the bare minimum amount of human decency: the ability to listen to someone talk about something serious and not be a complete asshole. Obviously his standards for Stark were too low, if Steve was impressed by his “good” behavior.

When Steve was finished talking, Stark waited for a moment, then stood. “Here,” he said. “How about the second course?”

Steve hadn't even noticed that he had systematically worked his way through the appetizers as he had talked. Once again he felt guilty, before he made a conscious decision to stop feeling guilty about food. He was just going to have to accept that Stark was planning on keeping him fed for as long as he stuck around. Steve couldn't feel guilty two or three times a day and still have a clear enough head to work. If everything went right, there would be plenty of food for everyone. Steve just had to keep that end goal in mind, and not let the decadence and charm Stark was showing him cause him to lose sight of that.

The second course was a salad: greens leafier than anything Steve had ever tasted out of a can. Fresh and crisp, tasting like health and vitamins. Steve munched on it happily, eyes slipping closed as the different flavors and textures passed across his tongue. Stark said there was spinach—which Steve had always known in its cooked form, never fresh—lettuce, kale, cabbage, and a whole host of nuts and berries like candy sprinkled throughout. Steve wanted to lick the plate when he was done, get every last bit of nutrition into his body.

“So what do you think?” Steve asked. Stark looked blankly at him. “I mean, about getting me to work. What Erskine said, about me and you being able to do something good together; something useful. Do you think you could help me? Do you think I've got something you might need, something that could prove useful to... whatever plan you have?”

Stark snorted. “What plan?”

“You do have a plan, don't you?” Steve asked.

Stark glanced around, like a plan was about to jump out and reveal itself in the fading light from the sunset off past the ends of the sprawling ghetto. “A plan for what, exactly?”

“For... For fixing things! For... For helping people. For getting them food, clothes, shelter, medicine, an education.”

“Were you struck deaf dumb and blind when you stepped foot into that apartment building Rhodey set you up in?” Tony asked, an edge of irritation in his tone.

“No.”

“Oh, okay, right. Then Rhodey must have neglected to mention to you that the apartment building you're living in is mine.”

“He didn't,” Steve growled. He already knew where Stark was taking this.

Sure enough, Stark leaned forward across the table, fingers curling around its edge. “Then who exactly do you think you are, Rogers, asking me if I have a 'plan'? Why don't we compare 'plans': yours versus mine. How many people do you think you fed, Rogers? No, no, really:” Tony held up his hands, anger starting to bubble up in his tone, raise his voice. “Go ahead. You give yourself a healthy estimate. Feel free to go over. Round up. How many people, in the... what was it, three years? Go ahead and round up to three years, I don't care. How many people in the three years that you've been doing this do you think you've fed? A thousand? Two? Ten thousand?”

That was far more people than Steve could ever claim to have helped thus far, even in his wildest fantasies. And him and Stark both knew it. Steve set his hands in his lap and squeezed them tightly together, leather gloves cracking.

Stark's eyes were gleaming as he leaned forward even more, chest hovering over his nice table with its fancy place settings. “Do you know how many people I've helped? How many people I've fed, clothed, housed? The medical care that people can get because of me? The technologies I've invented with my own two hands, then distributed out to everybody?”

“For a price,” Steve interrupted.

“Millions,” Stark continued, ignoring Steve. “Three million people live in and around my ghetto. There are more outside, that my networks are expanding into. You've got this idea of a revolution in your head, Rogers, like you need to storm the Bastille, disassemble the walls of New Versailles brick-by-brick. Maybe your doctor friend of yours sent you to me so I could tell you: it doesn't have to be that way. Revolutions are happening every day, in my town. Every time a family opens up their refrigerator, a young woman learns calculus on her Stark Ocular Implants, a child gets a vaccine for a preventable disease. This is how revolutions happen, Rogers. Not those fairytales of Robin Hood you obviously read too much of as a kid.”

“What happens when the sentinels get to you?” Steve asked. He tried to not to lean forward, to keep things civil, but he could help it. “What happens when the people inside New Versailles finally decide you've gotten too dangerous, are gaining too much influence?” Steve jabbed a finger out at Stark. “They're giving you enough rope to hang yourself, Stark. That's all. You think you're ushering in some golden age: real change will _never_ stick if you don't change the government, if you don't make sure the people have a say in their own futures.”

“By the time those ego-addicts in New Versailles pull their heads out of their asses long enough to look around, the revolution will be over,” Stark countered. “They'll be living in their walled city, with their cute little tech, and the rest of the world will have passed them by.”

Steve shook his head disbelievingly. “How can you think it will be that easy? How can you be so certain about how little those in New Versailles know of your actions? You yourself said you can't get tech in there to Sam, earlier today.”

At that Stark sat back, fingers drumming on his chest. Technically, he'd said that electrical tech couldn't make its way inside the city walls—he had pointed out quantum tech in specific as the exception to the rule. Tech like Steve's shield... and who knew what else.

“What do you know about me?” Stark asked, seemingly changing the subject. But Steve could tell by the way Stark's eyes were narrows at him, calculating, that he hadn't finished making his argument just yet. This was another angle on it, was all. “I must have quite the reputation, to have a strapping young man as yourself so skittish.”

“I'm not skittish,” Steve snapped. Then he curtailed his response, realizing that perhaps being tense and on-edge wasn't exactly discrediting Tony's description of him. “I don't have any reason to trust you, is all. Besides desperation.”

Stark smirked coldly. “Isn't that just what a guy wants to hear? 'I'm only talking to you because I have no choice.'”

“I got the impression that you didn't keep me on for my ass-kissing abilities,” Steve pointed out.

That earned him a chuckle from Stark, even if it was an aborted one. Steve breathed out slowly. As much as Stark got on his nerves, Steve was beginning to think Erskine had some specific plan for them, some idea of how they could work together more than just a throwaway suggestion. If only Steve could figure out what that was.

“I know that you're a smuggler,” Steve started with. Stark raised his eyebrows and shrugged, not denying that. “And a slumlord.” Again, Stark didn't deny the accusation. His lack of a readily apparent desire to contest Steve's claims made Steve bold. He set down his fork and leaned forward, across the table. “You're a cast-off of New Versailles. No one can agree if you were kicked out or left yourself, but no one can deny you used your position and knowledge to set yourself up as king of hell-on-earth, outside the pearly gates of your abandoned heaven.”

“Poet?” Stark asked, eyes cold.

“Artist,” Steve corrected.

“That explains you noticing my lights.” Steve didn't even think the comment was meant to be directed at him—just Stark noting something to himself. Well, let him take his notes.

“I noticed you never showed us what your prosthetics do,” Steve prompted. He had an inkling, based on Stark's own subconscious gestures—something to do with quantum technologies, like Steve's shield. But more than that, Steve didn't have a clue. Really, Steve almost half-believed that Stark had the pathways of glowing blue veins tattooed across his chest as some sort of aesthetic design: technologically advanced looking, but serving no actual purpose. Steve wouldn't be surprised by something like that, with a man like Stark.

“What? No gossip about this?” Steve didn't miss the bitter twist of Stark's mouth as he tapped at the center of the glowing blue network in his chest, though Stark tried to hide it behind false bravado and sarcasm.

“Just fairytales,” Steve said with a twist of his mouth.

“What's the fairytale?” Stark prompted.

Steve sighed, pressing his face into his hands. Stark was exhausting. At this point, Steve just wanted to make the journey back down the winding streets to his new apartment where Sam was waiting up on him. Still, if there was something to be got out of this working relationship, Steve was going to find it. “I've heard it said you have a clockwork heart,” Steve finally admitted. He glanced down at the blue veins, glowing in Tony's chest, converging to a single point in the center. Right above where his heart may be.

Stark nodded to himself, eyes darting down to the tablecloth. Steve had heard more before—more of the fairytale of how Stark lost his heart. But it painted Stark in too good a light for it to be true. For now, Steve bit his tongue and plowed ahead. “I don't have that kind of technical expertise. I'm just some kid from the north. What do I know about prosthetics, besides what others have stuck in me?”

Surely the same thought was occurring to Stark: Steve didn't think himself so clever that he'd be so far ahead of him. But Stark said nothing for a long moment, eyes searching Steve's face. When he finally did speak, it was to turn the conversation away from Steve's line of thought.

“What do _you_ think this is?” Stark asked, tapping at his chest.

Steve frowned. He couldn't understand why Stark wouldn't want to talk about what they could do together: how they could help each other. It was like he was purposefully avoiding being helpful.

Not just a little bit bitter, Steve spat out: “I think you like the way it looks. It appealed to your vanity, the technological king persona you've built up.”

Stark's eyes were tight as he laughed hollowly. “I like that theory the best.” His voice was flat.

The two men stared at each other for a long moment, bitterness and hurt rolling off the two of them in waves. Like Faraday field diagrams: raking into each other, disrupting each other's patterns, not yet forming a new one.

“I think it's time for the entrees.”

The “entrees” were disgustingly decadent. A whole hunk of cow meat, fresh mashed potatoes thick and creamy with milk and butter, and fresh steamed vegetables on the side: an explosion of color on the plate, greens and reds and oranges. Steve bit into a piece of the meat morosely. It was delicious.

“I suppose you even have wine for dessert,” Steve asked sarcastically as he poked at his vegetables. They tasted so good.

Stark's fork clattered to his plate, causing Steve to jerk his head up. When he saw Stark's flushed and angry face, he suddenly realized maybe he had misspoke one too many times.

“Here's a thought!” Stark's voice was dripping sarcasm. “How about you just _tell me_ what you want from me, I can give it to you, and then you can fuck right off, because I'm already sick of your morally righteous bullshit, Rogers.”

“I don't know!” Steve shouted. Damn it, _no one_ had ever gotten under his skin like this Stark. Steve was generally a pretty friendly guy, easy-going and understanding and empathetic, to a fault at times. At least that's what he _thought_. Until he met _this_ guy!

Stark rolled his eyes and threw his hands up, stomping away from Steve and toward the roof access door. Steve though he was actually going to just up and leave, but then he turned back around and started stomping back toward Steve. “Okay, try this on for size: give me an _endgame_.”

“New Versailles' walls are brought down and a representative government that is voted on by the people is put into place. Education and basic supplies that are necessary for living are distributed to the masses.”

Stark threw himself back into his chair, body slumped far down into it, fingers drumming at the tabletop. “Oh, is that all?” he snorted.

Steve had to laugh at himself, too. Except this kind of laughing sometimes felt more like crying. Steve brought his hands up to his face and rubbed at it. “That's all,” he murmured.

A moment of quiet—or as quiet as the ghettos ever really got, bursting with the sounds of life as there at all hours of the day and night. Stark's fingers were drumming on the clean white tablecloth, gaze focused off to the side, out to the city. In the far distance the skyscrapers of New Versailles were just barely visible, miles and miles away, forming against the dim backdrop of the fading light like a mountain range. They were much further away here than they were in Steve's home ghetto.

“Okay. Listen, Rogers: I've got work for you. Working helping people, like you want.”

Steve frowned. “I didn't come all this way for just work,” he pointed out. “I can get work anywhere. What I want-”

“-is to change the world; yeah Steve: I _am_ capable of listening, time to time,” Stark interrupted him.

Steve twisted his mouth ruefully. Okay. So even if Stark was a smug asshole, Steve probably shouldn't write him off immediately. Give him at least a half of a benefit of the doubt.

“It's just a temporary thing,” Stark continued. “Something to let me get a feel for you and your friend Sam while I sort some other cogs out. I know you're probably used to leading, but would you just follow my instructions for a couple weeks?”

“Used to following, actually,” Steve mumbled. He kept his eyes open, looking straight ahead at Stark, so he wouldn't have to see his memories of Bucky falling to his death playing out again against the dark of his closed eyelids. “But used to following someone I trust.”

Stark grinned, all white and toothy. “You don't trust me?”

Steve snorted, shooting Stark a _look_ from under heavy eyebrows. Stark just threw his head back and laughed, relaxing back into his chair.

“Alright, Steve. _Don't_ trust me. You just wait and see, and I'll wait and see, and we can both use this time to get a feel for one another. Sound acceptable?”

“I suppose...” Steve frowned. “You didn't tell me what the job was.”

Tony shook his head. “I'm not sure just yet. Give me a day or two, a week at most, to find place to fit the two of you. I've got work, there's always work, it's just a matter of figuring out where you'll do the least damage,” he teased.

Steve rolled his eyes. “Alright.”

A beat, during which time Stark's expression softened, almost grew vulnerable, or at the least nervous. He nodded his head over at the serving table next to them.

“Uh. I don't suppose you're going to want wine with dessert?”

As stern and disapproving as Steve tried to keep his expression, he found he just couldn't maintain his composure and collapsed into a fit of giggles with Tony Stark.

* * *

After Steve left, Tony stood on top of the roof and watched him hurry down the street, making his way back to the Stark-owned apartments that Rhodey had set him up in. Behind Tony were workers, clearing up the meals and tables from their dinner. Steve turned a corner and Tony lost sight of him, at least through natural means.

Heels clicking on the concrete of the building behind him alerted Tony to his assistant's presence. He waited for her to come up to him before greeting her. “What's up, Pep?”

“Do you enjoy making my life difficult?”

“I'm going to pretend that was a rhetorical question.”

“It was.”

Tony grinned and turned to Pepper, taking in her irritated expression and smiling back. “You're going to tell me you think this is a bad idea?”

“Astronomically.”

“Pep, Pep, Pep.” Reaching out to her, Tony placed both hands on her biceps and pulled her in, planting a kiss on her forehead. “You always think my ideas are bad ones.”

“Generally they are.”

Tony scoffed. “Then how did my empire happen? _Bad_ ideas?”

“No: _my_ ideas are generally good ones. And luckily you listen to me, enough of the time.”

Tony laughed. “Or you just go behind my back.”

“Steve Rogers,” Pepper stated, lips pressed together in a thin red line. “Bad idea.”

“Nope.” Cheerily Tony let go of Pepper and started back across the roof to the stairwell. Pepper followed closely, over his right shoulder. “ _Best_ idea.”

“You're not going to be able to control him.”

“Don't need to control him if we want the same thing,” Tony pointed out.

“Do you?”

Tony shrugged. “Semantics. We want same enough. Methods, paths, plans—maybe that's all mixed up.” The stairwell was well-lit, Stark energy hard at work. Tony hopped down the stairs as Pepper followed in a more controlled descent behind him. “His ideas are naïve, his plans like some kid first picking up a copy of Marx. But we want the same thing, in the end. And more importantly: he's got the power to get me what I want.”

At the bottom of the stairs Tony came to a stop, turning to look up at Pepper three steps above him. She raised her eyebrows at him. “Does he?”

Smiling softly, Tony stepped forward and held out his hands. Sighing, Pepper took hold of them, squeezing softly.

Looking straight into Pepper's eyes, Tony asked: “You saw him. Would you follow him?”

“He's barely more than a boy.”

“Could you love him?”

Pepper hesitated, a glimmer of empathy cracking through her normally frigid exterior. Tony squeezed her hands before letting them go and turning away.

“Trust me, Pepper: he's the one. With next to no resources and zero technical know-how, he managed to scrape a whole ghetto out of the abyss. He rallied thousands to him, in just a couple years and with nothing to his advantage.” Tony lifted his coat off the rack and shrugged it on. “Imagine what we could do together,” he mumbled.

“And don't forget about the Fates,” Tony reminded Pepper as he started to walk out the door.

“What about them?” Pepper called out after him.

“I had to snatch him up before they did!” Tony left his office in a flourish, slamming the door behind him. Outside, Tony breathed deep, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. Under his breath he mumbled “Greedy bitches,” before starting on the short walk to his home.

 


	5. Animals

 

For the fifth morning in a row, Steve got up before dawn, ran away from his apartment building until his muscles ached and legs turned to jelly, then ran the whole distance back again. He took a shower—a _shower—_ and got dressed. He made himself a breakfast with protein and vegetables and fruits, rationing his food but not starving himself. These four days had been the most consecutive days he'd ever experienced not starving, not having a pit in his belly screaming out for more food. It was too hard to resist the temptation to eat with all this food here, and some of it was perishable, so Steve didn't worry himself too much over eating it up.

After breakfast Steve settled at the desk in the apartment and started fiddling with the electronics Stark had left them, trying to see if schematics or electrical diagrams would suddenly appear in his head, telling him how to work all this stuff. Oh, he was learning _something_ from messing around with all this tech, there was no denying that, but there was also no denying that Steve just didn't have the kind of mind that understood circuits and transformers and stuff like that.

Sam stumbled into the kitchen a few minutes after Steve had settled down at the desk, pouring himself a bowl of cereal and chopping up fresh fruit on top. He slid into a chair at the kitchen table, one hand wrapped protectively around his bowl as he started to inhale his breakfast.

“You think Stark will come today?” Sam asked, same as he did every day.

“He's got three more days,” Steve answered back without looking up from the desk. He was _pretty_ sure this part was where the electricity was stored. Maybe.

“You fucked up,” Sam pointed out.

Steve growled and turned to face Sam, who was peering blearily over at him. “For the last time, things didn't end _that_ poorly with him! Words were spoken, but-”

“Less about what you said and more about what you didn't _do_ ,” Sam pointed out.

Steve pressed his lips tightly together. “It wasn't like that. He's a flirt-”

“-but not a monster, yeah yeah.” Sam rolled his eyes. “Just saying, we'd be put to work already if you just had gotten down-”

The a chime sounded, cutting through Sam's lewd suggestion. Steve practically jumped out of his chair at the strange noise, before he realized that must be the apartment's doorbell. Steve exchanged a wide-eyed look with Sam, heart in his throat. _Finally_.

Steve darted out of the desk chair, knocking it over in his haste to get to the front door. Fumbling with the buttons, Steve eventually figured out the one to buzz someone up and pressed it. It was only after the fact that Steve realized he probably could have pressed the intercom button first, find out who was at the door. Especially since, now that he thought about it, Stark _had_ to have access to all of his buildings, and wouldn't need to ask to be buzzed up. Unless he was just being polite?

A knocking at the door startled Steve out of his worrying thoughts. Sam was hurrying over from the kitchen, hands sans bowl as he reached for the door. Moved by a sudden nervous excitement Steve didn't really have time to process, Steve hip-checked Sam away from the door and reached for the knob himself.

When the door opened it revealed the smiling face of Tony Stark himself. He was dressed in more casual clothes today: a pair of work pants and tight t-shirt and a light coat thrown over it. Even though it was almost the same clothes Steve and Sam themselves wore, Steve thought the difference in means was obvious between them. Stark's clothes were new, nice. The color (a rust-red) was vibrant, the sleeves still with neat hems and no worn spots. The hem of his cargo pants were much the same, and all his clothes actually fit him like they were made for him, rather than being too tight or too loose (though that undershirt he was wearing could certainly stand to be a little bit looser, Steve suspected the tightness was by design).

“You two bored out of your minds yet?” Stark asked as he pushed his way into their apartment. Steve's mouth twitched before he snapped it shut. It wasn't _their_ apartment, anyway: it was Stark's. They were only living here as basically a charity case, at this point.

Stark was peering around the apartment, generally making himself at home. Sam raised his eyebrows behind Stark's back at Steve. Steve shook his head and mouthed _what do you want_ me _to do_?!

Sam made a lewd gesture that had Steve blushing bright red. Jerk.

Stark was too busy poking at the gadgets Steve had been tinkering with earlier on the desk to notice this exchange. He straightened after a moment, tossing the thing Steve thought might be a capacitor aside.

“Want some work?”

Steve stepped forward, nodding. “It's what we're here for.”

Stark grabbed something different off the desk and tossed it up and down in his hand, eyes tracking between Steve and Sam in assessment. Finally he grinned and nodded, stepping forward towards them. “Alright then. Come with me.”

As he passed by Steve he tapped his fist clutching the electronic device against Steve's chest. “I'm taking this. You were about to electrocute yourself.”

“No I-” Steve hesitated, glancing at the thing in Stark's hand as he trailed after him. “Oh, is that-”

“Yeah. Don't ever try and hook this up to that,” Stark confirmed, describing exactly what Steve had been about to try next.

Sheepishly Steve grabbed his jacket, cap, and gloves as he trailed out the door after Stark. Sam did the same, sans gloves but plus headscarf, and shut the door behind them.

“Do you mind me asking where we're going?” Steve asked as they stepped onto the elevator.

“Nope.” Stark popped the 'p'.

Steve waited for a minute, then rolled his eyes at Stark's smug expression in the shiny reflective metal of the elevator doors. “Where are we going?” Steve asked directly.

“Thought you'd never ask!” Stark commented brightly as the doors opened. Steve stumbled over his own feet rushing after him, Stark was moving so briskly.

Once outside the apartment, Stark took a hard left, the opposite direction from his office. From what Steve had gathered from his jogs around the area, this was the direction of the less fortunate area of town. Stark turned down to a train station, stepping up onto the train and swiping his hand at the ticket box. He gestured for Steve and Sam to do the same. Hesitantly Steve swiped has hand at the ticket box. It blinked green for a moment. It must be the apartment chips Rhodey had implanted into their hands—it was also a train pass.

Stark sat down in the first section of four seats that was free, taking the backwards-facing window seat for himself. Steve took the window seat across from him, and Sam sat next to Steve.

“I know you brought your goods into Erskine, right?” Stark asked, in lieu of answering Steve's question.

“That's right,” Steve answered patiently. He could only assume this had something to do with Stark explaining where they were heading.

“Ever distribute the goods yourself?”

Steve shook his head. “Doc Erskine usually handled all of that.” Steve didn't add _I don't need a reward for what I did—or acknowledgement_. Even in his head it sounded a smidgen too judgmental.

“Well today's your lucky day.”

Steve frowned. He glanced over at Sam, who already had his head cocked to the side as the train hurried them along through the ghetto, eyes unfocused as he listened in to his Redwing network. He shook his head when he caught Steve looking. Nothing yet.

“You want us to help distribute goods?” Steve guessed.

Stark glanced over at Steve, mouth smirking but eyes holding an apology. It was enough of a contradiction to make Steve sit up and take notice.

“No,” Stark corrected him. “I need help _not_ distributing them.”

Anger flared in Steve. He wasn't going to act as some... some tough man, keeping the goods away from those in much greater need than the likes of Stark. But he quelled that anger, because although Stark was an egotistical jerk who had some funny ideas on the social sciences, he was smart and the end results of his actions were overall good. Steve needed to keep his mouth shut and hear Stark out.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you're going to tell people they don't get the food, medicine, and clothes they thought they were going to get,” Stark replied enigmatically. The train turned a corner abruptly, causing Steve and Sam to slam to the right, Steve into the window, Sam into Steve. Tony sat unmoved in his window seat.

That anger inside Steve wasn't helping his patience just now. With a growl he reached for Stark's elbow, tugging him in. Stark let himself be pulled, leaning forward casually.

“Sorry for my presumption, but after a week of waiting around for you to come to us with work, I thought maybe you'd have something better than some stupid fucking _test_.”

“Is that what this is?” Stark asked airily.

“Cut the crap, Stark,” Steve growled. “You trying to see if I can do dirty work? If I've got humility or something? If maybe I was doing it for the acknowledgement all along, because I like it when people like me? If you think that, you really missed the byline of my personality.”

“Uh, Steve-” Sam cut in.

Stark was smiling at Steve, but his eyes were still hurting. Steve let go of his elbow and glanced back at Sam.

“What?”

“Tell him,” Stark ordered.

Sam was upset about something, his expression torn. “Looks like a shipment got intercepted,” he explained. He tapped his headscarf, where his ear was, just in case Steve had any doubt as to where his information was coming from. “Luke and Danny are trying to run damage control, but they don't think the next shipment is coming in until, uh...”

“Next Thursday,” Stark cut in with a wobbly smile. “Yeah. Six days.”

The houses and shops outside their train window were getting decidedly smaller and seedier as they traveled a few blocks. Gone were the fashionable high-rise Stark apartments, the multiple-family houses that were designed to be that way rather than single-family houses making due over capacity; those were all left blocks and blocks behind them. The houses in this area of town were pressed far too close together, running water and consistent electricity a fantasy. It wasn't the worst Steve had seen, not by far, but Steve got the feeling this area of town had seen better days. It had the feel of a newly-impoverished area, or at least an area that had seen a better level of poverty than it was currently facing.

“This is a felons' colony,” Stark explained as the train rushed through the narrow, grimy streets. “A place where New Versailles packed up anyone the sentinels caught with violations. They receive no funds, not rations, nothing. More than that, they're actively legislated against, to prevent them from getting any amount of utilities.” Stark's mouth pressed into a thin line. “This place is gonna get hurt worse than anywhere else.”

“Why weren't your supplies coming to this area _first_?” Steve asked in horror. He had never heard of a felons' colony. The few times he had ever seen people captured by the sentinels with violations, the sentinels had whisked them away, never to be seen or heard of again. He had thought, had been told his whole life, that those people were spirited away to New Versailles for execution. He supposed not all of them were.

Children peered out from the glassless windows of rudimentary shacks, glints and glimmers of technology visible on many of them: a cybernetic eye, hearing aid implants, a mechanical hand or foot. One little girl sitting on her front step had a nascent bamboo and metal pair of wings growing out of her back. Her body ended mid-thigh. Another boy's skin flickered in and out of existence, see-through then pink then golden then black and back again. A girl stuck her tongue out at Steve: it glinted metallically in the early-morning light.

“There's children out there,” Steve pointed out needlessly.

“Children aren't as good at not getting caught,” Stark pointed out. “Or a lot of the times you'll see the parents getting caught for prosthetics or black-market dealing or whatever other stupid fucking violations the sentinels want to charge people with, and the parents will bring their kids with them here because, what else are they going to do? Just orphan their kids, leave them behind? So the the kids are as good as criminals, too, and at that point, why _not_ get them whatever prosthetics they need?”

The train slowed and Stark stood, gesturing to Steve and Sam. “Our stop, let's go.” He glanced at Steve, eyes hard. “Let's see if you're all you think you are.”

Steve opened his mouth to protest—he didn't think he was anything special—but Sam bumped his shoulder hard and Steve snapped his mouth shut. Sam was right: his and Stark's bickering could wait for later. Now Steve had to figure out how to manage this situation Stark was throwing him into.

The platform for the train at this particular station was nonexistent: not even a cover to wait under. Steve stepped off into the dirt streets and glanced around, tugging at his gloves as he tried to assess the situation. The streets around them were packed: the population density was higher here than most places Steve had seen. It also had a disproportionally high number of children—more than could reasonably belong to the adults he saw. Which meant that a high number of the children and preteens and teenagers he saw running around were orphans. Steve watched a little girl on the street corner shoot bolts of electricity out of her fingernails at a stray animal. She threw her shirt over it while it was still on fire, putting it out and snapping its neck in a practiced act. She couldn't have been more than five years old.

“Is there a community center, or someone's house we can go to, to get the word out?” Steve asked. “We need some amount of organization...”

Stark was already pushing his way through the streets, apparently with some sort of destination in mind, so Steve hurried after him, Sam following behind him. When Steve caught up to Stark, he leaned over and told Steve: “There's a community center, of a sort. It's run by one of my guys who got stuck in here: Jennifer Walters.”

“Why is she in here?” Steve asked without thinking how that might be rude.

Stark didn't seem to notice, though, because he explained: “She was trying to act as some kind of civil rights lawyer for the people the sentinels were bringing in. Got thrown in here herself for it.”

“Did she have any prosthetics?” Steve asked.

“Not at the time.”

“But that's-!”

“Totally illegal, yeah.” Stark glanced over at Steve and raised his eyebrows behind expensive-looking sunglasses. “What, you haven't noticed that, yet? How the government in New Versailles pretty much does not give a flying monkey about what's legal and what's not? And why would they? They can just change the laws if they feel like it.”

Steve gritted his teeth. “This is why we need a representative government,” he pointed out.

Stark hummed, not disagreeing, as he glanced down a street to their left before ducking down it. His red coat was like a beacon of color in an otherwise grey and dull sea of downtrodden despair. It made him look elitist.

“Here we are.” Stark came to a stop in front of a relatively clean-looking building, well-repaired and taken care of. Steve glanced up and down it, then around the street. In general this area of the felons' colony seemed more organized and taken care of than the rest. Perhaps that was because it was the community center, after a fashion. Or perhaps it became the community center _because_ it was better maintained than the rest of the slums.

If the superior maintenance on the building wasn't enough to give it away as a community hub, the line of people snaking out in front of it, around it, and down the street from it would have been a dead giveaway. Steve took in the mass of people, eyes alighting on all sorts of different prosthetic enhancements, ages, skin colors, and body types. It was like the whole of the ghetto had turned up on this doorstep, one of every creed, color, and kind.

Stark pushed past these people with little regard for their protests, though there were surprisingly not many. Apparently Stark was known even in this area of town. Tony knocked, and the three men waited in front of the door for a few moments. Steve listened to the sounds inside: someone was bustling about, heading to the door. A hand snaked out and tugged at his coat, then his cap. Steve smacked Stark's hand away, scowling at the grinning man. “Just trying to make you look presentable,” Stark explained with a smile.

Steve brushed at his clothes and glared at Stark. “Just keep your hands to yourself,” he grumbled.

The door opened a moment later, revealing... not what Steve had been expecting. He wasn't actually sure _what_ he had been expecting, but it wasn't this. A young, muscular woman was standing in front of him, a mop of bright green, wavy hair. Her skin was a dusky brown: not as dark as Sam or Rhodey's, but certainly darker than Steve's pale pink complexion, or even Stark's more olive one. But probably the most noticeable thing about her was the fine, green, wire exoskeleton that covered her entire body, tracing the paths of bones hidden beneath her skin. Steve did his best to smile politely and not stare.

“Jennifer! How are you? Looking beautiful, as usual. Hey, so I brought some friends with me, hope you don't mind. Is that coffee I smell?”

Stark pushed his way in with his usual whirlwind of noise and charisma. Steve hung back at the threshold, nodding at Jennifer and still smiling. “Hello, ma'am. Nice to meet you. I'm Steve Rogers. This is my friend, Sam Wilson.”

Jennifer smiled winningly and held her hand out to shake both of theirs in turn. “Jennifer Walters, as I assume Tony already told you. Come in.”

“Thank you, Ms. Walters.” Steve stomped his feet at the doorway in an attempt to shake off some of the dust, then took his cap off as he entered the house. Behind him, Sam did the same, stomping his feet and unwrapping his headscarf.

“Oh, come on now,” Ms. Walters laughed. “Call me Jennifer. It's only fair, since I'm going to call you two 'Steve' and 'Sam'.”

“She mostly calls me 'moneybags',” Stark offered from further inside the room. Steve looked to find Stark already with a chipped cup in hand, and a bowl that was presumably a makeshift coffee pot in the other.

“To what do I owe the dubious pleasure of your company?” Jennifer asked Stark. Steve moved over to one of the couches spread about the room, standing awkwardly since he hadn't been invited to sit.

Stark sighed heavily and took a sip from his mug. Glancing over the rim of it, like he was trying to hide, he mumbled: “Shipment's not coming in.”

Jennifer's eyes widened in shock. “What do you mean it's not coming in? Where are Luke and Danny? Did something happen to them?” Jennifer flung one arm out toward the door, the hydraulics in her exoskeleton whirring menacingly. “I've already got a line of hungry, sick people out there-”

Stark set the mug down and held his hands up placatingly. “I know, I know. Shipment got nabbed—there's nothing I can do. It never even got to Luke and Danny.”

Jennifer jerked her thumb over her shoulder at Steve and Sam. “An what are these two jokers doing here? Do I have to babysit-”

“They're here to help. Steve's got a knack for calming people down, for getting them to listen to him, accept bad news.”

Incredulous, Steve opened his mouth: “No I-” Sam cut him off with a sharp jab to his side.

“I don't care if he's a sedative in human form, you're not going to get mothers to forget about their starving children by having him _talk_ at people!” Jennifer snapped. “Do you expect me to do it? Because that's low even for you, Stark: getting a middleman to take the fall for you-”

With a too-casual wave of his hand Stark cut Jennifer off. “Don't worry: I'll tell them myself.”

Steve's gut churned. He took a step forward towards Stark, hand extended. “Stark, that's- Maybe that's not the best idea.” It was noble and all, and the right thing to do, probably: take personal responsibility for what had gone wrong. But Steve had seen hungry, desperate people before—had been one himself, most of his life. They weren't going to see Stark's show of good faith as that: they were going to see it as a focal point for their anger.

“You can come with,” Stark offered Steve. “Calm them down. Drag me inside if I say something wrong. Sam: you can keep an eye on communications. See what people are saying, how public opinion is going.”

“Stark-” Steve cut himself when Stark turned to look at him, eyes hooded. Stepping forward, Steve pressed a gentle hand to Stark's elbow and pulled him aside. “ _Tony_ ,” Steve tried again. “This is foolish. You won't accomplish anything by going out there and telling them yourself. Maybe let someone like Jennifer-”

Jennifer snorted and crossed her arms. “I'm not breaking this news.”

“-or someone else handle it. It's...” Steve hesitated, not eager to get himself in too deep with a problem that wasn't his responsibility. But the stupid voice in the back of his head started up—that same stupid voice that had been getting him into trouble since he was a boy, intentions too big for his tiny frame to support. “It's what you brought me here for, isn't it?”

Stark winked rakishly and shoved Steve aside. “Nope,” he replied, already heading for the roof access stairs in the back of the building. “You're here for clean-up.”

Steve hurried forward, heart pounding in his chest harder with every step Stark advanced on his goal. He reached out and grabbed his arm, halfway up the stairs already. “This is going to get out of hand, fast.”

“Well that's why I've got you, isn't it?” Stark replied. Reaching down, he patted at Steve's cheek twice before ducking his head down to look at Jennifer and Sam, still standing in the room. “Alright!” Tony clapped his hands together. “Let's do this.”

Hands wringing each other in their thick red gloves, Steve watched, frozen, as Stark hurried up the rest of the stairs. It was only when Stark punched the door open to the roof that Steve sprang into action, following after him. Whatever Stark was, however much of a conceited ass he might be, the fact of the matter was that he did some good for the community, some of the time: Steve was man enough to admit that. And really, no one deserved to get torn apart by a mob for something that was outside their control, which was what was going to happen today if Stark handled this announcement with his usual lack of tact.

Stark was already stepping up to some kind of transmission system at the edge of the roof by the time Steve stepped up onto it. Cameras were pointed at the spot from all angles in addition to a pile of microphones stacked on top of each other on a high table. Stark peered over the edge of the roof, waving a little bit at the crowd beneath him before he stepped back into the range of the transmission devices.

“Hey everybody. Tony Stark here,” Stark started almost immediately. Stepping forward, Steve put himself into position just off-camera (at least, as far as he could tell), ready to jump in if Stark needed him, or to pull him out if necessary. After a moment of standing there useless, Steve fumbled at his gloves and tugged them off, shoving them into his coat pocket. The contact points on his hands gleamed bright white in the sunlight, etched-in stars shining in their center. Steve clenched and unclenched his fists, then shook his hands out nervously. He didn't think it would have to come to that, but. You never knew: when people got hungry, anything could happen.

The crowd was cheering Stark already, hungry masses below their feet reaching up at him, faces dirty but grateful. Steve clenched his teeth.

Stark's hands waved, beating down the applause. After a moment the ruckus died down enough for him to speak again. When he did, it was with an apologetic expression. It might have been the most serious Steve had ever seen him. Steve tensed against the inevitable reaction of the crowd.

“You all know how much I like to help you out: get you food, medical supplies, tech. Unfortunately, today I have found myself unable to procure you the aid I've promised you in the past. A shipment was intercepted. It was outside of my control.”

A murmur, a groundswell of noise going through the crowd, the mood changing person by person, group by group, like sound waves moving through sand. Steve tensed and clenched his fists, the contacts solid points in the middle of his palms.

“I'm sorry,” Stark continued, but anyone who wasn't blind—and probably anyone who was, too—could see that it was a hopeless endeavor. Public opinion was already against him, desperate people with hungry bellies looking for someone to blame. Lucky for them, they had someone right in front of their noses, literally talking down to them.

“I'm working with my teams to get a new shipment in to your community as soon as possible,” Tony explained, voice rising to be heard over the ever-increasing din. “We might be able to get you a replacement shipment as early as three days from now!”

“We'll be dead by then!”

“My son needs his insulin!”

“My children are starving!”

“ _I'm_ starving!”

“ _We're starving_!”

The first projectile lobbed itself up at Stark. It didn't even hit the second story of Jennifer's three-story building, but the intent was there. Like a thunderstorm breaking on a hot summer's day, that first thrown piece of garbage was soon joined by tens, dozens, hundreds more. Steve stepped forward and pulled Stark to him, activating his shield just as the first pieces of garbage and scrapped tech started to make its way up to their height, hurled by more powerful arms or mechanical devices.

Star fell back against Steve, letting himself be pulled away from the edge of the rooftop. Steve kept Stark's back tight against his chest, one hand out in front of him holding the shield in place and the other wrapped around Stark's shoulders. Steve winced as random bits of garbage battering against the glowing golden light of his shield turned into dangerous weapons: pulse blasts and bullets and flaming pieces of junk.

“We've got to get you inside,” Steve shouted into Stark's ear.

“Not arguing that,” Stark pointed out. Together the two men backed away from the rooftop edge and into the roof access door, Stark slamming it shut behind them. Steve didn't lower his shield until they were halfway down the stairs.

Downstairs, the situation wasn't much better. Jennifer and Sam had taken positions at windows and doors, barricading them against the angry mob outside. Pounding shook the thin walls of the building, so hard that it caused Stark to trip on the last stair and fall backwards. Steve grabbed him and held him close, protective instinct welling up inside him. He shoved Stark away before he could ruin it with some kind of flirtation.

“What's the plan?” Steve asked Jennifer and Sam.

Jennifer huffed and flipped her hair over her shoulder. “Wait out the angry mob and hope they don't tear my fucking offices down around my head?” she snapped. She turned to glare at Stark. “Good work.”

“It's not my fault!” Stark pointed out. The walls rattled some more. There was the sound of glass breaking on the other side of one of the barricaded windows. Stark turned to the sound, startled and off balance. Steve growled to himself. This whole situation was out of hand—and personally, Steve wasn't the biggest fan of situations when they stopped being under his control. Circumstances like that were what got people killed.

A cabinet against one of the walls shook and teetered precariously over Stark's shoulder. Steve's hands twitched together, his shield flickering to life as he kept a wary eye on the shelving. It came to a rest after a moment, but it wouldn't hold up under a more vicious assault from the mob outside.

Shoving Stark aside, Steve stalked forward to the cabinet and pulled it down. Behind him, Jennifer cried out in protest, but Steve ignored her. There was an army worth of people outside laying siege to this building, and Steve was going to react as such. Grabbing Stark's arm, Steve dragged him behind the felled cabinet and shoved him down. Stark peered up at Steve in bemusement.

“Stay,” Steve ordered. Stark snorted.

Turning back to Sam and Jennifer, Steve crossed his arms determinedly. “We just have to wait them out,” he explained. “They'll tire themselves out, get bored. We can last longer than them.”

Jennifer snorted. “Says you. Two problems with that not-plan. Number one, maybe we can outlast the people outside, but I'm beginning to doubt my building can. Number two: they're not our main problem.”

Steve blinked. “What? Who is?”

“Sentinels.” Stark's voice piped up behind him. Steve turned abruptly, a frisson of fear going through him. Sentinels. Shit.

Grasping at straws, Steve tried: “What do you mean? I thought this was the place where people got sent after the sentinels pick them up. Why would the sentinels patrol here?”

“Normally they don't,” Stark explained. His sunglasses were pushed up on top of his carefully slicked-back hair, red coat spread out around him on the floor like a carpet. “There's no regular patrols here. But if the people get out of hand, if the higher-ups in New Versailles think the violence and discontent might spread to the surrounding ghettos, then the sentinels get called in.”

“And they won't send the people they pick up to a prison community,” Steve finished the thought, jumping ahead. “This time, they'll really be taken inside the city.”

Stark's fingers tapped on his chest. “Probably should get to work on an extraction plan.”

Steve wasn't sure if Stark was talking to himself or Steve. The pounding and screaming at their walls made it hard to think, to have a coherent thought above the din and smell of fear. Going over to Stark, Steve set himself down on the cabinet and looked out at the walls. They had to figure out how to get out of here. Or how to guarantee that the sentinels wouldn't show up.

Stark flinched as the walls shook again, hair starting to sit up a little more messily thanks to the amount of times he was tugging his fingers through it. “These fucking animals,” Stark grumbled, cheek pressed against the cabinet. “You help them, feed them, clothe them. And then the second you can't produce, they bite the hand that feeds them. Dogs are better trained than these parasites.”

Steve stared at Stark with his mouth hanging open. His throat worked, trying to give voice to the emotion that tasted like bile rising in the back of his throat. “You elitist... ass!” he finally sputtered out.

Stark didn't even seem to care about what he had just said, not trying to save face or anything. He just rolled his eyes at Steve as the house shook around them again, the furious screams and shouts and poundings swelling to a crescendo around them. “You don't think this is animalistic?” Stark jerked his head in the direction of one of the walls. “You don't think that's a fair assessment of what's going on out there?”

“No.” Steve grit his teeth together, knuckles cracking where they sat clenching on top of his thighs. “No, Stark. Mobs act like animals, sure. But people are people, and all mobs are made of is people.” Something blossomed in Steve's gut, then: something he knew he had to do. That voice, that stupid, noble kid voice, was telling him to get up and get out.

Steve listened to it. Standing, Steve vaulted himself over the cabinet and started towards the front door, with intent. Stark cried out behind him, but before Steve could open the door Sam got to him first, palms up and shoving Steve back. “Whoa, whoa there, cowboy. Where do you think you're going?”

“I'm going to talk to them,” Steve said. It was the only right thing left to do. “Try and get this figured out.”

“Uh, maybe not-” Sam stopped talking and reserved his argument strategy when Steve glared at him. “Or, you could give me five minutes with Redwing and try and figure out something concrete to tell the angry people out there. How's that sound?”

Steve's lips twisted as he thought about this. It felt like stalling, but it was also probably a better plan than... well, nothing at all. Steve nodded shortly. Sam breathed a not even remotely subtle sigh of relief.

“Okay. Just... tell me what I'm looking for.”

“Well first: Stark?”

Steve turned around. Stark's head popped up from behind his cabinet, teeth worrying at his lips framed in that tidy goatee of his. “Yes, dear?”

“You're releasing eighty percent of the inventory in your storerooms.”

Stark balked, mouth dropping open. “I don't... Why do you think...”

“You have storerooms,” Steve informed Stark, cutting through the crap he was sure to try and lay on, given some more time. “Everyone who accumulates wealth accumulates a safety net. I'm not asking you to get rid of all of it: we just need enough to be a show of good faith to these people, and try and get them started on surviving to the next shipment. Sam.”

Sam stood up straighter, shoulders pushing back as Steve addressed him. Steve blinked confusedly at the movement before ignoring it and pushing ahead. “You need to start combing for other shipments. Anything within two days' journey of here. Wherever it was going: it's now rerouted to here. Black market, government rations, doesn't matter. Anywhere is going to survive better than this place for a couple days until new supplies filter in. When you find those supplies, you get in contact with Danny and Luke, and you get them hauling ass back to us, supplies in tow. Got it?”

“Sir yes sir.” Sam even saluted. Steve rolled his eyes and smacked him in the shoulder.

“Stark?”

Stark glared at Steve, sitting cross-legged on top of the cabinet now and filing his nails. “What? Going to ask me to give someone the shirt off my back, too?”

“I would if I wasn't half certain it was painted on,” Steve pointed out. Stark actually seemed _pleased_ by the observation, but before he could say something flirtatious back Steve was already steamrolling ahead. “Do you have a way of getting in contact with Ms. Potts and getting your supplies here now?”

Stark rolled his eyes and went back to filing his nails. “Already done. Rhodey's on his way.” He paused, then glanced up at Steve and explained: “Figured he could handle the crowds better than Pep, on the off-chance it gets ugly.”

Jennifer cleared her throat meaningfully behind them. Stark rolled his eyes again. “That wasn't _sexist_ , Jen. I was talking about Pep in specific, not your gender as a whole. If I thought you cared even a thimble for my well-being, I'd have _you_ out there busting heads and doing the heavy lifting for me.”

Jennifer smiled toothily back at Stark. “Lucky for me, you can keep your thimble of affection, because you're right. But that's not what I was trying to say. You guys see that wall back there?” Jennifer threw her thumb over her shoulder to the right side wall of her building. It was rocking violently. “Yeah. I can go try and hold it up for a couple minutes, but it sounds like someone's got some kind of battering ram to it—it's coming down sooner rather than later.”

“Hold it up as long as you can,” Steve ordered. Jennifer nodded and was off without hesitation, long wavy hair bouncing behind her. She turned around to press her back against the wall and spread her arms and legs out, hydraulics in her exoskeleton whirring as she locked them into position. Her teeth gritted and tendons in her neck strained, but suddenly the wall wasn't half-buckling with every pounding hit. They had a few extra minutes of time.

Steve turned to Sam next, whose eyes were half-closed and moving rapidly under his lids as he accessed the Redwing network. “Sam: I need an update.”

Sam's eyes snapped open, honing directly in on Steve's. “Got a little bit of something. Luke's heading to intercept a shipment of rations a few ghettos over; Danny's heading to a black market storeroom a dozen train stops away. It's not enough, but it's something.”

“ETA?”

Sam's eyes unfocused, lashes fluttering. After a moment he came back to himself: “Twenty-five, thirty minutes on the soonest?”

“Stark?” Steve turned to the man, still perched atop the cabinet. “ETA on Rhodey?”

Stark's head was already bent down, checking something in his hand. A few seconds passed, then he tucked the thing away into his inside jacket pocket and smiled over at Steve. “Fifteen minutes. Think we'll last 'til then?”

Steve's lips pressed together. He'd done all he could on the supply side of things. Now he had to try and control the demand, which was literally beating down the door.

“I'm going to talk to them,” he asserted. He turned to Sam, who was already opening his mouth to protest. “We need fifteen minutes. I can get us that. This might be a mob, but it's a mob made up of people. Hungry, scared, desperate people, but people, in the end. I'll make them listen.”

“Steve.” A hand on his arm, dragging him away from the stairs. Stark was staring at him, mouth hanging open and eyes pleading. “They're going to eat you alive.”

Steve knew that. At least, objectively he did. But deep in his gut, he didn't feel anything like fear or anxiety. With a small smile Steve reached up and plucked the sunglasses from Stark's head and shoved them into his hands. “Better me than you. After all, it's like you said: you help millions. I'm only good for a couple hundred lives improved.”

With that, Steve left a sputtering Tony Stark behind him as he rushed up the stairs with Sam.

“We need to bring all this downstairs.” Steve explained.

“Why not just make your speech up here?” Sam asked, even as he helped dismantle as much of the equipment as they could carry. Steve was piling equipment into his own arms, not even sure what half of it did but knowing there were cameras and microphones in the mix, which was what he needed. Stark could figure out the technical aspect for him.

“I don't want to be looking down on them,” Steve explained as they hurried back downstairs.

“So you'd rather step out into a rioting mob? Right. Great plan,” Sam grumbled behind him.

Ignoring Sam, Steve jogged down the last few steps and landed already moving. “Stark!” Stark's head popped up from where he had been doing something with the thrown-down cabinet and the wall opposite the one Jennifer was holding up. Steve hefted the equipment in his arms. “I need you to rig something up for me.”

Stark's eyes glittered at that, an actual smile quirking at the corners of his mouth. He cracked his knuckles loudly and skittered forward. “What have you got in mind?”

Five minutes later, and Steve was certain Jennifer's office wouldn't hold up another ten. Stark was having almost constant updates from Rhodey, who was heading their way as fast as they could in a private car. Steve balked at the expense, but then again, it was faster than trying to get everything loaded into a cargo train.

Microphones and cameras jutted out from Steve's person like some kind of abstract art statue—something commenting on the integration of humans and machines, maybe. Steve pushed down the thoughts, tinged with hysteria. He was okay. He'd be fine. He had his shield, after all. And these were _people_. They'd listen. They had to.

Stark was watching Steve nervously, bottom lip red from chewing on it. The thought flittered across Steve's mind on how attractive Stark was like that, raw red lips and increasingly-mussed hair. But Steve pushed that down too. He was obviously hysterical, just a little bit.

“You sure you want to do this?” Stark asked.

Steve took a breath. “Nope.” His hands jangled at his sides, itching to be brought together, to release his shield. “But it's what you brought me here for, isn't it? It's why you're feeding me, housing me.”

Stark looked pained to have that pointed out. His mouth opened like he was going to deny it, but no words came out and he ended up gaping like a confused fish. Steve flashed Stark another grin and a wink.

“You'll see,” he muttered as he brought his hands together. “They're _people_.”

The second his shield was up, Sam flung open the door and Steve rushed out, battering surprised rioters back with solid, golden light. The door slammed shut behind him in a moment, the sounds of barricades being put back into place barely reaching Steve over the din.

Before the rioters around Steve could regroup, Steve turned to the one closest to him: a young man with brown hair and light skin. He was flanked by a burley blond man with darker skin, probably around the same age. They couldn't be more than sixteen, seventeen. The brunette had pulse blasts at his fingertips, the blond with a club clenched in his fists.

“What's your name, son?” Steve asked, addressing the brunette.

“Billy.” The name stumbled out of the man in shock, too startled to keep it in. After a moment Billy added: “Billy Kaplan.”

“And yours?” Steve asked the blonde. He had piercings up and down his ears.

“Uh. Teddy. Altman.”

Steve's voice was loud, echoing through the streets. Parts of the crowd were quieting. Steve had caught them off guard, tricked them into humanity again. But it wouldn't last long.

“I'm Steve Rogers.” Steve stuck his hand out, dropping his shield as he did so. Sweat prickled at the back of his neck, along his forehead, his eyes. But he had to trust that this was right. Trust in people. Otherwise this whole thing wouldn't work.

He hesitated a long moment, that Billy Kaplan. But after glancing over at Teddy and getting a confused little shrug, he reached out and took Steve's hand, shaking it briefly, one pump up and down.

“I'm from a ghetto to the north of New Versailles. In the shadow of the wall. I came down here because I got caught—I escaped, but. I can't exactly show my face at the food lines anymore. You know how that is, right?”

“What'd you do?” Teddy asked, butting in.

Steve smiled kindly at him, with just a touch of wryness. “I used to steal food from New Versailles' storeroom. Or, one of them, at least. Me and my best friend Bucky. Did it for two years, without getting caught. Until we did, this last time a month, month and a half ago.”

When Billy or Teddy didn't seem quick to respond, Steve rushed onward. “Now I'm trying to do the same thing. Get food to everyone. And I've got food coming here. Food and medical supplies. The first batch will be here in five minutes. Two more batches'll follow within an hour.”

“What the fuck was Stark yapping about?!” A voice shouted out from the crowd. Steve jerked his head up, scanning. There: a young girl with black hair, sitting on top of a streetlight with tattered purple shoes and shirt. In her hands she had some kind of electrical projectile weapon, static flickering dangerously between her fingers and the bow that would launch it. Steve's shield would hold up to electricity, but not the cameras. Steve needed to make sure she didn't fire it at him.

“What's your name?” Steve asked, not needing to shout because his every word was projected over anything with a speaker in this ghetto.

“Fuck you!” the girl shouted back. The crowd murmured. Sweat pricked at Steve's fingertips. He couldn't lose them: not now. Not when he was so close.

“That's Kate,” Billy explained. Steve turned, beamed at him for a moment. Finally a bit of luck in the form of an over-friendly kid.

“Kate.” The girl scowled from her perch and crossed her arms. “You raise a good point! Stark had a shipment set aside just for you guys: planned to arrive today. But it got intercepted.”

“So then what are we getting?!” someone shouted. Steve couldn't see him.

“You're lying!”

“There's no food!”

“It's a different shipment,” Steve explained, fighting to keep his voice calm. He turned to Kate, trying to talk just to her, to ignore the voices in the crowd. “I worked with my friend Sam Wilson, who has nanite drone prosthetics. He was able to look through his network and find some extra food, medical supplies, amongst other things. We located three places we could take from and get to you good people right now. The first batch should be here any second.”

Steve turned back to Billy and Teddy, smiling kindly. “I know what it's like to have a hungry belly. And what it's like to have someone relying on me, and not be able to help them. But I'm here to make sure that doesn't happen today. Not to any one of you. You'll get your food, you'll get your medicine.”

The crowd murmured, but not negatively. Steve's heart pounded. He had them. He actually had them on his side, listening to him. What if he started to talk against New Versailles? What if he convinced the people to organize, to rise up as one? There were so many around him. So many who were angry, hungry, hurting. Whose lives could be focused, made into a tool to take their agency back, take control.

A rumbling in the distance. A car engine, tires treading over old asphalt and more dirt than that. Slowly Steve let a breath, releasing the selfish thoughts that had rushed through his mind. Like he had told Stark: these people were _people_. Not animals, and not tools. Right now they needed food and medicine. If later, when Steve had a plan and resources, they chose to join Steve's quest on their own accord, then that was up to them. Steve wouldn't let it be the choice of the mob.

Rhodey rolled up through the crowd right to Steve, people parting to let him through. He jumped out of the truck and shook hands with Steve, gripping tightly at his forearms. “Everything cool?” he asked, eyes darting around at the hungry crowd surrounding them.

Steve smiled calmly. “Everything's great. Just got a lot of hungry people here ready to get their supplies.”

Rhodey nodded. “Better not keep them waiting then, huh?”

“Billy, Teddy.” Steve turned to the two young men. “Do you mind helping me set this up? You'll be first in line.” Billy and Teddy both shared a surprised look, but then they were smiling at Steve.

“Sure thing!”

“And how about you, Kate?” Steve asked, turning to where the young woman was still perched up high, glaring down at him. “Would you help?”

A moment's pause, then a stern: “Fine!” She jumped down and out of Steve's sight, only to reappear a minute later at the back of the car, holding out thin, muscled arms for Rhodey to stack crates of canned goods in. Her weapon was tucked across her back, powered down. Steve nodded his thanks at her and then continued working himself, hauling the food out to the tables Jennifer had already set up for the anticipated shipment that morning.

Around them, the mob was slowly forming itself back into a queue, friends and neighbors working together to roughly approximate the order they had earlier in the day. Steve kept a careful eye out for shoving or fighting, but there was nothing more than a few minor, quickly quelled altercations. By the time Danny and Luke arrived—Steve greeting them in person for the first time—Billy, Teddy, and Kate were already at work passing out carefully rationed supplies, their own loot stashed under their feet.

Six hours passed before Steve came up for air, a torn-open protein bar shoved into one hand and a bottle of water into the other. Steve stepped back from the distribution line for just a moment, keeping the denizens of the felons' colony under a watchful eye as they came forward and took what was rationed to them. No one looked like they were about to try and take more than their fair share, but not so long ago this organized crowd had been a mob, and Steve knew how little it could take to push them back there.

“Thank you,” Steve said belatedly, turning to see who had given him the food and water. To his surprise, it was Stark smiling sheepishly back at him. He had ditched the red coat and sunglasses, and his hair was back to its messy end-of-the-day dark halo that Steve had seen once before. Without any of those adornments Stark almost looked like he belonged—especially with the glowing network of blue spider webs beneath his skin, spreading out from the center of his chest and shinning through his thin, too-tight t-shirt.

“Do you really think you should be out here?” Steve asked after he had taken a long gulp of water. He had been so relieved when Stark had opted to stay hidden away inside Jennifer's building throughout the supply distribution. Sam had come out and helped, of course, and Jennifer went to work repairing her building while yelling at anyone who passed too close.

Stark shrugged, hands shoved in his pockets as he glanced around. The lines were still stretched long, but the milling crowd was gone, the streets mostly clear. “Figured it was safe to come out now. How you doing?”

Steve had half the protein bar shoved into his mouth, so it took a few seconds of chewing before he could reply. Stark grinned at him while he waited. “Good,” Steve finally managed to mumble around his food. “Few more hours here; should be done before dark.”

“Why don't you call it a day?” Stark suggested. “I'll take you back, get you fed.”

Immediately Steve opened his mouth to protest, but Sam was there to cut him off.

“ _Go_ ,” he insisted. “We've got plenty of help here, between us and the young ones.”

Steve frowned over at the gaggle of kids who had joined Billy, Teddy, and Kate early on in the day. Their friends and one sibling, apparently. Steve had hesitated letting so many in to help work, but the more hands the better, and the kids were proving to be trustworthy—or at least not stupid enough to try and run off with extra supplies when Steve, Sam, Jennifer, Rhodey, Danny, and Luke were all right there.

“There's too much work still to do. And we can't just leave them unsupervised.”

“I'll stay,” Sam offered. He put a hand on Steve's shoulder and squeezed comfortingly. “You've done enough today. Get some rest.”

“It's no more-” Steve started to protest.

“Perks of being the man with the plan,” Sam cut him off with a smile. “None of this would have happened without you. Take the rest of the day off.”

Still Steve hesitated, looking around at the work that needed doing. The food and goods weren't nearly distributed yet—it was going to go well into the night. But Stark's smile was inviting at his side, and Sam's hand was pushing him away. So Steve allowed himself to be bullied into resting, just this once. Maybe he had earned it, after all.

Stark led Steve to the same decrepit train station that they had gotten off at earlier today—a memory that felt like it was a week ago, not just a few hours ago. As Steve climbed onto the train with Stark and settled into a seat against the window, exhaustion suddenly hit him like a solid wall, everything he had seen and done today hitting him with full force. Steve groaned softly and laid his head against the window, closing his eyes.

“You alright?” Stark asked. Steve could heard him settling into the seat across from him, could feel his feet propping up on the seat next to him. Reluctantly Steve opened his eyes. Stark was smiling hesitantly at him, that veneer of charm still in place but spread thin over genuine concern.

“I'm alright,” Steve replied softly. Stark's answering smile was more brilliant than the pollution-illuminated sunset.

“I was just doing what you had brought me here to do, after all,” Steve reminded Stark.

Stark shook his head. “In my wildest fantasies, I never thought you'd be able to do something like that. And trust me, I've had plenty of fantasies about you.”

“Obviously your imagination is lacking,” Steve shot back, without any heat. After today: saving the situation, stopping it from deteriorating into something truly tragic, Steve was feeling generous with his affections. Even towards Stark.

“I've never seen anyone talk a mob out of a riot,” Stark pointed out.

“That's probably because you, and everyone else, doesn't bother to remember that mobs are just _people_ ,” Steve replied. Lifting his head from the train window, Steve focused more fully on Stark. “You called them 'animals' back there. They're not. None of them. The bad, the good, the poor and hungry, rich and stuffed. We're all just people.”

“You said this is what I brought you here to do,” Stark replied, a seeming non sequitur. “It's not. I brought you here to protect me when things went to shit. Be my bodyguard detail. You just stopped a riot with the power of love.”

Steve flushed. “It wasn't with the 'power of love',” he grumbled. “I talked to them like they were people. Treated them with respect. The power of a mob, the momentum of a riot comes from people losing their identity, that individuality becoming sublimated into the crowd. By talking to them individually I brought them back to themselves.” Steve winced. “But maybe I'm not ready to try it again any time soon. It's a miracle it worked.”

“And the fact that you found extra supplies: that helped.”

Steve nodded. “That helped. But the reason I found the supplies in the first place was because I was willing to look for them. You gave up as soon as the first shipment was lost.”

“I had a shipment; that shipment got snatched two hours before it was supposed to arrive. What was I supposed to do?”

“Find a way.” Steve leaned forward, hands—gloved again, after the crowd had proven itself to be controlled—linking together between his knees. “There's always another way to do things. You think black, white: but there's other colors, too. Or even something that's not a color at all: a number, a letter. There's always some other way to look at things.”

“You're giving me a lecture on lateral thinking?” Stark scoffed, but not unkindly. “I'm an engineer: I _invented_ lateral thinking. Or at least, reinvented it. Modified it and souped it up and made it better. Alexander might have cut the Gordian knot, but I invented velcro.”

Steve laughed, shaking his head in the face of Stark's insurmountable ego. And yet when he glanced across the small gap separating him, got a good look at Stark's charming smile and boyish confidence, Steve couldn't find it in him to dislike the man.

“Then why didn't you think of a solution today? Why did it have to be me?”

Stark shrugged, leaned back in his seat unconcerned. “Sometimes it takes an outsider's perspective. I'm not too narcissistic to think I couldn't use a fresh pair of eyes now and then. But you know: sometimes there's not a way. Sometimes that Gordian knot is made of steel, and lifting your sword to chop through it will only end with a shattered sword.”

“Then you invent velcro,” Steve shot back. “There's always a way, Tony. _Always_. Don't ever think you have to compromise, to sacrifice people's lives because there's 'no other way'.”

Stark's lips pressed together and he sank in his seat, contemplating Steve from beneath lowered brows. “I think we might end up disagreeing on this,” Stark pointed out. “But I guess that just means I need to keep you around. At least to yell at me to invent that velcro.”

Steve smiled, chest warm when it prompted Stark to smile back. “I can promise that much at least, Stark.”

Stark sighed and leaned back in his seat. “You know what I'm in the mood for?”

“ _Stark_ ,” Steve growled, flush rising on his cheeks.

Lazily Stark waved his hand out. “No, not that. A fairytale.”

Steve's mouth opened slightly. “Ah.”

“What was the fairytale you heard about me?” Stark asked.

Steve rubbed his hands together, leather sliding his gloves smoothly over each other. He considered how to begin for a moment before he started speaking. “I heard a story about that clockwork heart of yours, just once. That you cared about the people too much, back when you lived in New Versailles. And the other citizens of the city didn't like that. So they ripped your heart from your chest and threw it out, in an effort to steal away your empathy for us poor and downtrodden folk. And it worked: for a little while. But you were so smart, and so clever, that you went and made yourself a new heart: a clockwork heart. And when the citizens realized that, they decided you would have to be killed, because nothing else they could do would stop you for caring for us. So you ran away to live among us and save us all.”

Steve looked over at Tony, taking in the tired lines of his face, the bright gleam of his big, sad eyes. “But that's just fairytales.”

Stark nodded, looked away. Mumbled: “Fairytales.” His fingers tapped at his chest. After a moment he glanced back at Steve and smiled tightly. “After all, I'm not half as good as that story makes me out to be. Sounds more like you, doesn't it, Robin Hood?”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Stark,” he groaned.

An exaggerated pout crossed Stark's face, the motion of the train rocking their bodies gently. “Save a guy's life, seems like you should at least call him by his first name. I've been taking the liberty with you, after all,” Stark pointed out.

Steve rolled his eyes. “If you insist, _Tony_.”

 _Tony_ smiled, brown eyes bloodshot and encircled by dark bags, but glittering with happiness.

 

 


	6. Liquid State

 

The warm, buttery taste of the breaded roll hit Steve's tongue like a breaking wave, mouth watering around the delicious, soft, sweet bites. A pinch of honey was drizzled along the crusts, and a dash of salt, making Steve close his eyes as he chewed himself to distraction. His intel analysis could wait. It wouldn't be right to be distracted while he ate such good food.

“Am I interrupting? I could leave you and the roll alone until you're finished.”

Mock-reluctantly, Steve opened his eyes to the sight of Tony Stark peering down at him overtop gaudy sunglasses. He tried to sigh and scowl up at Tony, but in reality he was pleased to see him.

“It's been two weeks and you choose to show up now? When Jarvis' rolls and I are erstwhile engaged?”

Tony laughed and took that for an invitation to plop himself down across from Steve, chair turned around so he could cross his arms over its back. He swept the sunglasses off his head and tossed them carelessly on the table between them. Steve ate another bite of his roll, savoring it. “Normally I'd let you and the rolls have your alone time, but duty calls.” Tony's smiled softened and he ducked his head a little, glancing up at Steve from beneath long, dark eyelashes. “How've you been?”

“Good,” Steve answered just a little too quickly. He flushed and resolved to put on a cooler front. “But you would know that. Don't tell me you haven't been monitoring mine and Sam's every move.”

“Where is he this fine morning, anyway?” Tony asked, completely unable to fake not knowing. “Not a fan of Jarvis' rolls?” Tony's fingers skittered across the tabletop to snatch a bite of one of Steve's rolls. Steve scowled but let him. There was certainly enough to go around.

“Out helping Danny on a run. _You_ know that: you sent him out there.”

Tony frowned. “Did I?” he plead confusion.

Steve rolled his eyes. “So? You must have a reason for sending Sam out on a job and leaving me this morning to myself.”

“Maybe I just wanted to eat breakfast with you,” Tony suggested.

Before Steve could reply to that, the owner of the little restaurant, Jarvis himself appeared. He had a breakfast sandwich on a plate and a cup of coffee in either hand. When he set it down in front of Tony, the man beamed up at Jarvis and reached out to clasp his hand. Steve's eyes caught the subtle exchange of money slip from Tony's palm to Jarvis'. He opted not to comment on it.

Once Jarvis was gone Tony took a long, indulgent gulp from the coffee mug, smacking his lips and moaning absurdly. Steve flushed and popped another piece of bread roll in his mouth to distract himself.

“You're actually eating breakfast with me?” Steve asked as Tony bit into the breakfast sandwich.

Tony grinned around bread and eggs. “'Actually', yes. I'm eating breakfast with you. But to be fair, you're right: not the only reason I orchestrated this morning.”

“Do you have more work for me?” Steve asked, even though it was a foolish question. Steve had been working plenty these last few weeks: little jobs, making sure people got the food and supplies they needed. Tony was letting him and Sam integrate more and more into his black market network as the weeks went by and they proved themselves capable. All those times, Tony had contacted Sam and Steve through intermediaries: Rhodey, Pepper, Danny, Luke, Jessica, or Jennifer. Or Tony just sent a message via electronic messaging system. He'd never come in person to talk with them—not since the incident down in the felons' ghetto.

The work Tony had them doing was daily, and good work. Some days Steve felt it was busy work, but that was okay: it was busy work that was actively helping people, far more people than Steve had ever managed to help on his own. And it didn't take so much time out of his day that him and Sam couldn't sit down for a few hours every night and plan. For what, Steve hadn't quite figured that part out just yet. But when the big picture finally came to him, he'd have the details already figured out.

Tony shook his head as he chewed on a too-large bite of his sandwich, cheeks puffed out and butter dripping from the corners of his mouth. Steve was pretty sure it was a sign that he was beginning to be unfortunately smitten with the man that he didn't find the display disgusting.

When Tony finally swallowed his food—or at least the majority of it—he spoke: “I've got an errand to run today, thought you might want to come with. Before you ask, it's not like the last trip we took together.” Tony grimaced a little, wincing at some secret. “Or at least, it _shouldn't_ be. The ladies might not like me, but we're not about to tell an entire town that they're out of food, so. It'll at least be a wash.”

“Ladies?” Steve asked.

Tony leaned forward, grin tickling at the corners of his goatee. “You ever catch wind of a little black-market set-up called the Three Fates?”

Steve shook his head. “No. What do they deal in?”

Mysteriously, Tony said only: “Information.”

Steve squinted at Tony, trying to figure out what the word might mean in this context, but Tony's lips were firmly sealed. Tony wanted him to wait and see for himself, he supposed.

“And you swear they won't start a riot?” Steve asked instead.

Tony laughed, burying his face in his forearms on the back of the chair. “Two of them might punch me in the face, the third might send me to another dimension or some fantastical shit, but no: they won't start a riot. Hell, they'll probably _like_ you, knowing my luck.”

Steve smiled. The Three Fates. A little bit dramatic, but alright. If they were important enough for Tony to visit them personally, and bring Steve along with him, they probably knew what they were doing. Even if they had an overly self-important name.

“Do I need to bring anything? When do we leave?”

Tony nodded at Steve's rolls. “As soon as you're done with those little delights. No rush. They'll know we're coming.” When Steve quirked his eyebrows at Tony, he explained: “They deal in information. What Sam's got, his Redwing network? Like a set of Legos next to New Versailles, his network compared to theirs. They know all and see all.” Tony wriggled his fingers dramatically while rolling his eyes. He flopped his hands back down over the back of the chair with a huff. “Not that all that information is any good without food in your stomach and a roof over your head, but you'll never get the _ladies_ to admit that,” he grumbled.

Steve took all this in, cataloguing it carefully. Every bit of information he gathered was good—it might be useful one day. You never knew.

Wrapping up the last couple rolls in a napkin for later, Steve finished his juice and stood up. “Well,” he prompted. “If they really can see all and know all, best not keep them waiting.”

“See: That's why they'll like you more than me.”

* * *

 “ _If they really know you, I'm sure they like you. Respect you, at the very least_.”

“Well he's smitten,” Carol snorted.

“And he seemed so smart.” Jessica stalked forward and leaned her chin on Carol's shoulder, watching the feeds with her.

“You just wanted him to be smart because you thought he was cute.”

“ _Objectively_ he's gorgeous,” Jessica pointed out. She sighed as she flopped her head on Carol's shoulder.

“What he looks like doesn't matter.” Wanda's voice interjection into the conversation caused Carol and Jessica to part. Wanda strode in, eyes calmly sweeping across the feeds and taking in all the information in one moment. “Who he decides to share a bed with doesn't matter. What matters is what he managed to do with Jennifer's people.”

The feeds flickered, some of them switching over to reply footage from a week ago. Scenes from the felons' ghetto flashed across the screen: Tony Stark making his unfortunate declaration to the crowd and the ensuing riot which started. Then Steve Rogers stepping into the crowd, visage and words captured and broadcast out from every angle. The calm that followed. The cooperation and solidarity of the crowd.

Red lips like a little bow curled up into a smile as Wanda glided forward and pressed a hand to the machines. “Thank you, Vision. The replay is unnecessary.” The feeds flickered and returned to all of them relaying current streams.

“Wanda.” A male voice, Pietro standing in the doorway, watching the three women. Wanda turned and arched an eyebrow at her twin, waiting for him to continue. “They're on the train,” he announced.

“Thank you, I know.” Wanda smiled sweetly at her brother. “You'll stay around? A show of masculine force?”

Pietro laughed but nodded. “Sure. Masculine force. Like I'm any good against something that could incapacitate the three of you.”

Wanda went over to Pietro and kissed him on the cheek. “We know that. But we're having guests: one of them is a new guest. It's never a bad idea to keep up appearances.”

Carol threw her thumb over her shoulder at the screens. “If he's half as smart as we think he is, he won't mistake Pietro for the threat in the room.”

“His _boyfriend_ Tony Stark'll probably tell him on the way over,” Jessica grumbled.

“You always did like blondes,” Carol teased her.

Jessica sighed wistfully, reaching out to stroke at Carol's blonde hair. “If _only_ I liked women.”

Carol shrugged, smiling over at Wanda. “Maybe, but I also preferred red heads myself. No offense.”

Jessica snorted. “None taken.”

“We'll see how it goes once they arrive,” Wanda said calmly. “Until then: there is data that needs observing, information that could use collecting.”

Carol and Jessica bobbed their heads in acknowledgement and the three women drifted apart, each to their own tasks.

* * *

 Steve thought maybe his little ghetto was the last bastion of anybody without a flair for the dramatic. When he had first met Tony, Steve had figured him for the theatrical type, given over to a certain degree of showmanship. But the more people Steve met outside his home ghetto—Jennifer, Rhodey, and now these “Three Fates”—the more Steve thought that maybe his ghetto was a model of restraint and down-to-earth ways of going about things, and everyone else out in the world was just off their rocker.

Case in point: the building Steve was stepping up in front of behind Tony. It had nothing on Tony's apartment complexes and cleanly developed buildings scattered all around his ghetto. It didn't appear to be technologically advanced or emulate the skyscrapers of New Versailles. It harkened back to a much older time, a two-story structure dressed up to look like a Delphic temple, only instead of marble its pillars were steel, instead of open entranceways there were gauzy curtains stretched over concrete doors and iron rebarb.

Tony nudged his shoulder against Steve's. His sunglasses were pulled down over his eyes again, hair slicked back, the aristocratic red coat back on his shoulders. Steve thought it wasn't a good look on him—made him look too much like those up in New Versailles, like an elitist—but it wasn't like Steve could dictate Tony's wardrobe. Especially when they were going to see someone who Tony knew, not Steve.

“Check this out: you see the flame?”

Steve glanced around, eyes tracking for some gold or red or blue, standing out amidst all the grays and browns of the ghetto. Nothing was immediately apparent. “No.” Steve shook his head.

Tony nudged his shoulder again and winked overtop of his sunglasses at Steve before striding forward. Steve followed a few steps behind, curious. When Tony reached the bottom steps of the building he dug into his pocket and pulled out a little metal cylinder—some kind of flashlight, maybe. Sure enough, he turned it on the pillar directly in front of him and a little purple beam of light shot out. Steve watched as it traced along the surface, stuttering to a stop when it flashed over a different-colored spot. Tony moved the flashlight in a circle, tracing the full shape of the design on the pillar. It was a flame.

“Oh.” Steve said, feeling just a little dull for a moment, then realizing he had no reason to feel that way since the flame was _invisible_ to the human eye, and therefore he had no way to know it was there until Tony showed him.

Tony flashed a grin over at him before clicking off his flashlight and tucking it back into his jacket. “Yeah. Three Fates, ancient Athens, Flame of Delphi, it's all,” he waved his hand vaguely at the building as they continued up the steps. “They've got a theme going, is what I'm saying.”

Steve looked Tony up and down as the other man rapped on the concrete door, knuckles grazing through the thin sheets hanging over the doorway. “And you don't? Have a theme.”

Tony's barking laugh was swallowed by the sound of the door opening, concrete body scraping noisily over concrete floors. Tony jumped back, startled.

“Huh,” was all he said for a moment as he peered in. Steve began to get a little nervous. There was no one on the other side of the door: just a long corridor, stretching off into the darkness. At the end, Steve could just make out a stairwell that led down. Well, not like _that_ was foreboding in the slightest.

“Problem?” Steve prompted when Tony made no move to step inside the open doorway.

Tony scratched the back of his head, mussing up his hair before smoothing it back down. “They never open so quick for me, is all,” Tony explained. After a moment he shook himself, flashing a smile to Steve. “They must like you.”

“They can't like me,” Steve grumbled. “They haven't even met me.”

He was already getting sick of people telling him how likeable he was. Ever since his little stunt in Jennifer's ghetto, people were practically falling over themselves to tell Steve how much charisma he had. Personally, Steve didn't see it. What he had done at Jennifer's was just common sense: taking a minute to think about things, think what he knew about crowds and people and trying to come at it from an angle no one else was thinking of at the time. In person, Steve knew he could be judgmental, abrasive, not a little bit “scowly” (as Bucky had put it) and sometimes too slow to see the humor in things everyone else did. Not to mention stubborn as a mule. No, in person Steve was no more likeable than any other person. Tony's high opinion of him was an exceptional case, and not a little bit embarrassing.

Tony was peering around the building, fingers trailing over doorknobs that they passed on the way to the stairs in the back. Steve would have been trying them too, if he didn't already feel eyes on him. If these ladies really did like all that Greek stuff as much as they seemed to, they were probably fond of tricky little tests. Best to keep his hands to himself.

When they got to the staircase Tony peered down it for a moment, fingers drumming on the wrought iron railing. It was a spiral staircase, leading straight down. That made sense: the building didn't seem to have a big real estate footprint from the outside. Spiral staircases were efficient in a limited space.

“I'll go first,” Steve offered, because it didn't even occur to him not to.

Tony snorted and was already starting down the stairs. “Like hell you will. I've been here before: I go first.”

With Tony four steps below him already, Steve had no choice but to sigh and follow.

The nature of spiral staircases meant Steve was treated to a three-sixty view of the basement room he was entering. He ducked his head, squatting a little as he walked, to take in as much detail as possible in his relatively short descent.

The basement appeared to be a great deal larger than the above-ground structure: almost cavernous rooms, sprawling out surely far beyond the bounds of the little building it sat below. Highly illegal, not that it mattered.

The first notable thing about the basement, aside from its size, was the amount of computer that filled the space. Monitors covered every single inch of wall, ceiling, and large amounts of the floor. It was like a computer shop had sneezed all over itself. And the screens weren't static, either: every one of them were alight, images flickering across their surfaces, sometimes even more than one per screen. It cast the basement in a bright but artificial and ever-changing light. The effect was almost nauseating, before Steve had a chance to get used to it.

In addition to the images flittering across thousands and thousands of monitors, noise filled the air around Steve: a cacophony of dialogue, street sounds, nature. The hum of daily life, magnified by a hundred thousand—a hundred thousand people's lives, the sounds that accompanied them all swarming together, sifting through each other until just a unintelligible hum came out the other end. It wasn't loud, but it was omnipresent, filling every inch of audible space. Steve wasn't sure how anybody gathered any useful information out of such a din—or stayed sane.

As Steve reached the bottom of the stairs, three women glided out of a door on the far side of the room. One had long black hair and a young, angry face. One had blonde hair, pulled back and up out of her narrowed, assessing eyes. The third had a mane of curly red hair, red lips with a soft smile to match. The three settled into three chairs at their side of the room: the red-head in the center, the blonde on her right, and the black-haired woman on her left.

“Come along,” the red head called out to them. “Steve Rogers. We've been expecting you.”

“You took long enough,” pointed out the brunette.

“Stopping for sweets.” The blonde smiled wickedly, gaze fixed firmly on Tony.

Steve flushed. Tony had wanted to give him a treat he'd never had: artificial sugar. He had insisted they stop at a stall as they passed it on their way here from the train station. Now the sugar felt like it was burning through his tongue, churning unhappily in his stomach.

“We are Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos.” The red head gestured to the brunette, the blonde, and herself in turn.

Tony rolled his eyes and snorted next to Steve, stomping forward until he was standing a few feet from the women. Steve hurried to follow. “Or Jessica Drew, Carol Danvers, and Wanda Maximoff.” Tony renamed the women in the same order the red-head—Wanda—had.

“Uh.” Steve hesitated, glancing between Tony and the women. It was probably rude to call them by names other than the ones they had introduced themselves by.

Luckily he was saved the headache by Wanda, who smiled coyly and confirmed: “Or those names, if it suits you.”

“Where's the runt?” Tony asked, twirling his sunglasses in one hand.

Wanda quirked an eyebrow at Tony. “My brother?”

Tony was glancing around—behind him, on either side of the women. There wasn't anyone there, and it wasn't like they could be snuck up on. Steve wasn't sure what Tony was expecting to find: was Wanda's brother exceptionally small? Was he invisible?

Steve didn't have to wonder long, because Tony turned to Steve and explained: “Wanda's brother Pietro has a prosthetic that allows him to control Heisenberg probability fields.” He glared at Wanda. “So he _says_. But he's never let me examine it and prove that that's one hundred percent bullshit.”

“Is it?”

Steve jumped about a mile out of his boots. A man had just _appeared_ next to them, in a flash of a couple blurry movements behind them all happening in a second. He was tall and thin, hair shockingly white though he didn't appear to be much older than Wanda, if at all.

Tony was scowling at the man, even though he had startled, too. “There's no way you're quantum accelerating yourself by dropping into the furthest distance electron probability billions of time every second. That sentence is ridiculous. That sentence needs to be taken out back and shot by the dignified sentences of classical mechanics, because it is complete gibberish and is not a thing that can happen, you lying jerk.”

Pietro was laughing sharply at Tony's little diatribe. Steve wasn't sure what any of this was about, but Tony was looking sour about the whole thing, so Steve was inclined to feel sour with him, or at least be on the defensive.

“Do you want to explain why you chose to visit us, Tony Stark?” Wanda asked, interrupting any further bickering between Tony and her brother. Steve thought he might like her. She seemed keen, but more maternal than Tony, less sharp and witty and more coy and knowing. The blonde woman on her right, Carol, seemed to keep all the angry for the whole of them, and the brunette on her left, Jessica, all the sharp disinterest.

Tony mumbled something that sounded like “As if you don't already know,” but then raised his voice and plastered on that fake charming smile of his for Wanda and the two other women.

“As I'm sure you ladies have already noticed, I've got myself a new business partner.”

Steve balked at the word, shooting Tony a suspicious look. _Partner_? Like Steve was somehow equal to Tony, in with him together on this rather than no more than some hired muscle or an errand boy at this point. Tony might be trusting Steve with more responsibility, but they were far from _partners_. Still, Steve kept his mouth shut. He knew this wasn't the time or place.

“I figured better to hold the formal introductions sooner rather than later. So ladies, I'd like you to meet Steve Rogers.” Tony shot Steve a quick, bold smile. “He's the fulcrum I'm going to use to remake the world.”

Steve's face heated, either from embarrassment or anger, he couldn't even tell. Who was Tony to say these things about him? He was just some idiot kid from a small ghetto no one ever heard of, and Tony was just using him as a glorified pack mule. Even if he was some great asset, Steve was his _own_ man: not Tony's fulcrum.

Wanda's eyes were trained on Steve's, like she knew what was going through his head right now. Steve tried to school his expression to be more blank, but he never did have a good poker face. He was pretty sure he only managed in seeming constipated.

“It's a pleasure to meet you, Steve Rogers,” Wanda replied with that oh-so-secretive smile of hers.

“We saw what you did at Jennifer's,” Carol followed with.

“Either you're a lucky idiot or a saint,” Jessica pointed out.

“Maybe both,” Carol suggested.

“We haven't decided.”

“Ladies.” Wanda's chastisement was kind but firm. Carol and Jessica snapped their mouths shut, with a huff and an eye roll, respectively. “Steve is our guest. We mustn't overwhelm him on his first visit.”

“Mustn't do that,” Carol grumbled.

“Mustn't.” A third echo of the word, from Jessica.

Steve found the way the three women spoke in chorus to be very, very disconcerting. And always in the same order. He wondered if maybe they had some sort of hive-mind prosthetic. It would probably be rude to ask.

“But Tony Stark,” Wanda's gaze shifted to Tony, growing drastically cooler in an instant. “You are not a first-time guest. What is your business with us?”

“Come to try and sell us goods we don't need?” Carol suggested with a smirk.

“Or buy information from us with currency we don't want?” Jessica followed.

Tony's expression was easy, but his body language tense. Steve could see it, so surely the three women could see it.

“I brought you Steve, didn't I?” Tony asked them. He gestured at himself, then at Steve, smarmy smile firmly in place. “Aren't you going to give me credit for the one time I get things right? No guns, no supplies, no food, no medicine. I brought you a future. That's got to be worth something.”

Briefly the thought crossed Steve's mind that Tony sounded like he was selling or bartering Steve for favors. He should probably be concerned about getting sold to these women or something nefarious like that. But even though they hadn't known each other that long, Steve thought he was starting to understand Tony. And if there was one thing Tony was overly fond of, it was Steve. Tony wasn't about to give him up for anything.

The thought, possessive and somewhat twisted as it was, actually was pretty reassuring.

“And what do you want in return?” Wanda asked.

“You always want something,” Carol pointed out.

“Greedy rich boy,” finished Jessica.

Tony didn't even bother to protest, which probably said a lot about the amount of times he and these women had interacted in the past.

“Information.” The three women all looked like they were going to deny the request, before Tony hurried quickly on. “Not for myself: for Steve.”

Steve nodded like he knew what the heck Tony was talking about. He was already planning on having a stern discussion with Tony on their way back to Tony's ghetto—this was just one more thing to add to the list ( _Point one: Don't talk about me like I'm a commodity to be bartered. Point two: Don't talk about me like I'm some tool that you're using. Point three: Don't barter for gifts for me that I never asked for..._ ).

Wanda's eyes were trained on Steve's now. Steve swallowed and did his best to look like he knew what the heck any of this was about. He was pretty sure he didn't succeed.

“Well then, Steve Rogers. What information do you seek?”

Steve glanced over at Tony. The other man was staring down at his fingernails, checking them for dirt. _Great_ , Steve thought, now _you clam up_.

Well, if this was Steve's present, then fine. He'd ask for whatever he could get.

“Do you have information on New Versailles? Blue prints? Schematics? I'm looking to find out as much as I can about the layout of the city. Entrances, exits. Energy lines, sewage. Anything you can get me.”

Wanda's lips quirked up into a tiny smile. Even Carol and Jessica seemed amused.

“Such an easy request,” Wanda commented.

“Fish in a barrel,” said Carol.

“Electrons in a wire,” Jessica finished.

Steve wondered if they were going to do that every time.

An unearthly glow overtook the women, their eyes filling with a golden light. Steve locked his knees to keep himself from taking a step backwards. “Vision?” All three women's heads tilted back, like they were talking to the ceiling.

And, sure enough, the ceiling talked back. Steve really should have expected as much.

“Yes, Moirai?”

It was at this point that Steve felt himself giving up on trying to understand the more unbelievable things he came across in life. He immediately felt a deep sense of relief as something inside him unclenched. Probably his sense of up and down.

The three women spoke in unison again, heads still tilted up to the ceiling. “Steve Rogers wants to know New Versailles. Oblige him.”

“Certainly.”

Their heads dropped, and the women were earthly again, human.

“What other information do you seek, Steve Rogers?” Wanda asked sweetly, like nothing unusual had happened.

“We've got it all,” Carol promised with a smirk.

“Even the stuff you don't want to know,” Jessica added.

Steve glanced between them, wondering where the heck his information on New Versailles was. Would he get it at the end? Was that Vision thing putting together a pamphlet for him or something? One look at the women and the power they obviously wielded, and Steve decided it would probably be best to just forge ahead and not question their methods.

“Can you give me information on... us?” He glanced over at Tony, who had abruptly stopped feigning disinterest and now was eyeing Steve curiously. Maybe even approvingly? Steve turned back to the women. “I mean, on the population. Big picture statistics: numbers, prosthetics, demographics. Where food or medical supplies are most needed, where there's a extra. Can you do that?”

“Such big numbers,” Wanda hummed.

“So much information,” Carol mused.

“It paints a picture,” Jessica finished.

“That which is worth fearing is three,” the women said as one.

“The sea in storm,” Jessica said.

“A night with no moon,” Carol continued.

“A gentle man going to war,” Wanda finished. Her eyes bore right into Steve's staring him down. He almost wanted to apologize for his request.

Next him, Tony snapped his fingers impatiently, shocking Steve out of his guilt for a moment.

“Alright then, time to wrap it up.” Tony was making a twirling motion with his finger, like he was bored with the whole process already. But under that, Steve could see a certain degree of... something. Nervousness? Tony was avoiding looking at him, like he didn't want Steve to know what he was thinking.

“Threatened, Tony Stark?” Carol asked. On the other side of Wanda, Jessica smirked and giggled.

“He doesn't understand. Steve Rogers finds data more useful than all his resources: money, buildings, food, drink,” she said. “Data is King.”

Carol was grinning cruelly along with Jessica. “What could be more important than that?” she mocked. “Data is King.”

Tony glowered at the women, but said nothing. A muscle in his jaw jumped, but his mouth stayed firmly closed.

Steve felt a fierce sense of protectiveness well up in him, like had back in Jennifer's ghetto. Without stopping to think if it was maybe not the best idea to offend the women he was asking for a favor from, Steve stepped forward, disapproving finger waggling at them.

“Hey, I don't know what you think I'm up to, but whatever it is, I couldn't do it without Tony's resources. No one's any good without food, water, or medicine. And no plan is any good without people, real people, to enact it.” All the women's eyes were on his, critical and assessing. Steve hesitated, dropping his hand back down to his side. “Uh. Not to say that information, data, isn't vital, too. But they both are. It all is.”

In the corner of the room Pietro stirred, taking note of the proceedings since the first time they started. Steve wished there was an unsubtle way to take off his gloves, or that he had the foresight to remove them before Tony had led him into this lion's den. Then again, these women would probably know all about Steve's special abilities and refuse him entry if he tried such a thing.

When the women finally spoke again, it was Wanda: “Your faith in people is well-placed, Steve Rogers. Your faith in their bodies is not.” She paused, then the next words rolled off her tongue like fine brandy: “Data is King.”

Steve grimaced. Riddles. Great.

But then Wanda was smiling sweetly, even though Jessica and Carol were still scowling faintly at him. “Pietro?” Wanda asked.

Pietro was at their side in a second, a blur of nanoseconds of motion from one end of the room to the other. He held out a little memory stick at Steve, sealed in wax. Steve took to, trying to study the wax in the dim light. The seal pressed into it was the same flame that Tony had pointed out to him outside their building. Steve tucked the device into his inside coat pocket and nodded his thanks at Pietro. He was sure Tony would let him borrow one of his readers to look at the information.

“Thank you, ladies,” Tony said next to him. He was slipping on his sunglasses, cool cockiness already returning to his demeanor. He bowed extravagantly. “The supplies will be in your ghetto tomorrow. Hope those bodies you think are such crap enjoy all the food, water, and medical supplies I have the ability to provide.” Tony kissed his hands and blew kisses at each of the women in turn, grinning viciously.

It was a foolish jab, but Steve couldn't find it in himself to be irritated with Tony for it. These women had a premium on an importantly commodity, sure—but Tony did a _lot_ of work disseminating everything he did. Every day it felt like Steve was discovering more Tony did, being introduced to an even longer reach of his arm. Just here, apparently Tony supplied the Fates' entire ghetto with supplies, just for... what? A tiny bit of information for Steve? And he had even said that Steve was what they wanted in the first place, so the supplies were just extra.

Pietro blurred past Steve faster than he could blink, pausing just a second in front of Tony. He said something, Steve couldn't pick up what. But then he was gone back to the other side of the room, at his sister's side. Tony turned pale, looked shaken, but he was already spinning towards the stairwell with his usual flair, red coat fluttering out behind him, before Steve could ask. After briefly bobbing his head at the three women, Steve hurried after him.

“Actually...” Steve hesitated at the spiral staircase, body turned back towards the three women. Tony was above him, already four steps up the staircase, when he realized Steve wasn't following him and stopped.

Wanda was gazing knowingly at him. Steve was really getting peeved by their all-knowingness. They were still just women, just people. Even with that Vision computer system, or whatever it was, of theirs, it didn't mean they knew all. Didn't mean they could read his thoughts.

Shoulders back and making full eye contact with Wanda, Steve forged ahead. “Doctor Erskine. From my ghetto. Is there... I just want to...”

All three women's face turned sharply downward at once. When they spoke, it was in that round-robin way they did, first with Wanda, then Carol, then Jessica.

“Go home, Steve Rogers-”

“Don't ask-”

“Don't know.”

Steve's whole body tensed, his mind whirring. He took a step forward, towards the women.

“What do you mean? Is Erskine in trouble? Do I need to go back home?”

“Go home, Steve Rogers.”

“Go home, Tony Stark.”

“Go home.”

Steve growled, teeth grinding, fists clenching. “What do you mean?” he tried again. “Am I supposed to go back to the apartment in Tony's ghetto, or go home, where Erskine is?”

“Take him home, Tony Stark.”

“Go home, Steve Rogers.”

“Go home.”

Prophets: you could never trust them. Steve knew that. It was always riddles and half-answers, tricks making you fall into your fate when you tried to avoid it.

Steve tried his best to get a straight answer: “Is Erskine in trouble?”

Simultaneously the three women's heads snapped up, six eyes glowing faintly as they bore into Steve's. Steve found himself taking an unconscious step back, bumping up into Tony's solid weight behind him. He must have descended back down the stairs to Steve when he saw he was staying behind.

“We are all in trouble, Steve Rogers,” Wanda's voice rang out.

“We are all going to die, Steve Rogers,” Carol's voice joined Wanda's to fill the basement.

“We are all in need of saving, Steve Rogers.” Jessica's voice added to the din, enough to make Steve wince. Tony's hand squeezed at his shoulder.

“ _Save us, Steve Rogers_!” the women shouted in unison.

Their voices echoed through the chambers, _save us, save us, save us_ , repeated a half-dozen times before it faded away. The glow around the women faded with it, the unearthly fire in their eyes dimming until it left as the last of the echoes died.

Tony's hand tugged on Steve's shoulder. Steve opted to listen to it, stumbling after Tony up the stairwell. Tony's hand didn't leave his arm until they were back out on the street.

“What do you want to do?” Tony asked once they were out of the building and in the open air.

Steve stared out at the people hurrying around them, a thousand and one lives bustling and thrumming, striving to survive. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his grey-blue coat, squinting against the bright afternoon sun, diffused through the smog from New Versailles.

“Listening to prophets always goes wrong,” he mused. “If I try and go back now, rush in to save Erskine from this vague threat, I might end up inadvertently bringing trouble down on his head.”

“That does tend to be how it works out,” Tony agreed grimly. When Steve continued to stare straight ahead, he prompted: “But?”

Steve sighed, shook his head. “But if I stay here and do nothing, and Erskine's in trouble...”

Steve was shocked out of his contemplative self-pity with a hand on his arm—Tony's hand, gently gripping Steve's bicep, his bright eyes looking up into Steve's.

“We can leave tomorrow, completely under the radar,” he offered. “Or not. But if you go, I'll go with you. At least that part seemed clear.”

Steve turned it over in his mind for a long moment, replaying every word that the Fates had relayed to him.

“We'll go tomorrow,” he agreed. “Under the radar. Stealth valued more than speed. Can you do that for me?”

Tony's grin was lopsided and cocky, but his eyes were deeply serious. “I can do anything for you,” he promised.

Steve was fighting against a blush so hard that he completely forgot to ask Tony what Pietro had said to him.

 


	7. Save Me

 

That night, Steve found sleep elusive. Rather than toss and turn and keep Sam awake half the night, Steve opted to throw on an undershirt and went for a jog. The ghetto was still alive around him, even at this early hour and with energy restrictions firmly in place. The glowing lights and bustling life of the ghetto must all be Tony's doing, Steve knew. No one in his old ghetto could get away with using this much electricity, not without some kind of independent generator and then having the fuel for it. Tony made all of his buildings run off the government grid, under the radar of New Versailles or the sentinels who imposed her law. Steve had seen some of the generators once, when he ventured into the subbasement of the building he and Rhodey were put up in. It was a big, noisy thing, running off goodness knows what. Steve would have to ask Tony that, sometime, and hope he understand even part of the answer.

Steve jogged past a section of town devoted to fish markets, closed up for the night but still smelling distinctively of its wares. Steve smiled a little as he breathed deep, feet pounding solidly over the unevenly paved streets. That smell was always going to remind him of the first dinner with Tony, his introduction to this decadent ghetto. A decadence, Steve was beginning to realize, that wasn't necessarily too much. It was a level that every person had a right to live at: constant energy, food, clean water, _hot_ water in their homes. Steve had thought it too much when he first arrived, but that was because he couldn't imagine _everyone_ having access to such things. The more he saw Tony's technology in action, the more he saw of his systems, his methods, the more Steve thought maybe it could be possible.

Of course, that was where he and Tony differed. Tony still had this idea in his head, this fantasy world where you were allowed to keep the things you earned, where the system wasn't specifically designed to keep the vast majority of people down, outside New Versailles, always wanting and dependent on them to fulfill their most basic human needs. Tony thought that it was just a matter of gradual change, of disseminating the technology and education _enough_ that New Versailles wouldn't matter, that society outside its walls would reach its level or even surpass it, and that New Versailles would do nothing to stop such a revolution. It was a peaceful, gradual, organic revolution, but it was still a revolution. Tony didn't seem capable of _seeing_ that.

But Steve had seen it. His whole life he had seen it. When he was a little boy and Clint had his first set of mechanical eyes plucked out by a sentinel and he was left screaming and crying in the street, fumbling blind for the crushed remains of his sight. When Natasha had stumbled in from the cold to Doc Erskine's home one bitter winter night, fingers crackling painfully with unregulated electricity surging through them. She had never said what happened, but it had all the hallmarks of a sentinel attack.

When Sam and Steve had first decided to undergo augmentation, and Bucky had chewed nervously at his lip through the whole discussion until finally he couldn't hold it in any more and ranted and raved about how they would be _found out_ , how the sentinels wouldn't just rip out their enhancements but would _kill them_ , because they were old enough to know better. Old enough to be a threat.

New Versailles wasn't just some city trying to keep the poor and hungry masses out. New Versailles wasn't just hogging all the resources to itself. There was something far more malicious at its heart. Where Tony thought it was just a matter of them not understanding, not realizing that society didn't have to be a zero sum game, Steve knew better. Even if everyone could win, if people in the ghettos could have as much as the people in New Versailles, they would be kept down. They would be stomped out. New Versailles wasn't protecting her precious resources, rationing them out as best they could to the people. Tony could create a perpetual motion machine and it wouldn't be enough. They needed to keep everyone else down. Steve didn't know why, but he knew that's how it was.

As Steve's long strides carried him further out, away from his apartment and into the ghetto, he became aware of some kind of commotion. People weren't just going about their lives, bustling around with the steady rhythm of life at work. Some kind of news was spreading through the people: in the late-night coffee shops, in the gambling dens, in bars. Steve ignored it for a few blocks, until he noticed everyone was rushing off, heading the same direction. His feet slowed to a stop and Steve breathed a few deep breaths, taking in the crowd hurrying around him. Was it a sentinel raid? Steve's hands clenched nervously. He hadn't worn his gloves outside the apartment, lulled into a false sense of security. Stupid of him.

“Excuse me?” Steve asked, trying to catch the attention of someone, anyone.

No one stopped. Steve clenched his teeth. Humming to himself, he glanced around. There: one of the bars had an open front and a radio was sitting out on it. There must be something over the airways for people to be so unified in their flight. Steve hurried over to it and started flipping through the channels.

 _Music, music, New Versailles propaganda, music, talk radio..._ Steve hesitated with his finger on the knob, listening. But no, it was a show on do-it-yourself prosthetics. He flipped through more channels.

“- _public execution. That would mark this as the first public execution since the ration riots twenty years ago._ ”

Steve's heart froze in his chest. Who was being executed? What for? They didn't _do_ public executions anymore—not since he was a kid. What had someone done that inspired New Versailles to go to such drastic measures?

Immediately Steve's mind went to Erskine, and the vague, useless warning the Fates had given him yesterday. He almost stole the radio and took it with him to listen for more updates, but he remembered himself at the last minute and left it where he had found it. He took off down the streets with his heart in his throat, only one place in mind: _Tony_.

It took maybe fifteen minutes at close to a dead sprint for Steve to reach Tony's apartment-slash-office building. His feet pounded up the stairs, rattling the bamboo steps as he sucked in great bit quantities of air, trying to catch his breath back. Around him the city was starting to stir, the panic spreading from those few who had been awake already to rousing those who had been tucked away in their beds. People filled the streets, who families clutching each other tightly, angry young people standing around with their prosthetics on full display. A riot was in the air, the city a tinderbox just waiting for the fuse to be struck.

Steve pounded hard on Tony's door.

It took maybe a minute, but the door swung open under Steve's fist to the sight of a disgruntled Happy Hogan, shirtless and squinting sleepily out at Steve.

“I need to speak to Tony,” Steve explained in a rush, already pushing past Happy. Not for the first time, Steve silently thanked Doc Erskine for his increased bulk and height. He would have never been able to do this as the skinny, underfed adolescent he once was. This time, however, the feeling of gratitude was tinged with fear. Steve ignored Happy's half-hearted protest and rushed through the building, to the backroom where he knew Tony slept.

“Tony!” Steve called out even as he burst through the door to Tony's bedroom.

The room was dark, almost completely. The only light inside was coming from Tony. He was shirtless, sprawled out in his bed with the sheets down to his waist. The network of blue energy that was etched into his chest was glowing, throwing shadows and light across his body.

Steve rushed over to his bedside and shook Tony awake, almost earning himself a punch in the jaw as Tony flailed and fell sideways, almost out of his bed.

“Fuck, Happy! What?! Happy!”

“Tony, it's me, it's Steve.” Steve gritted his teeth as he shook Tony some more, hoping to shake the sleep-induced confusion out of him. They didn't have _time_ for this.

“Steve?” Tony's expression of complete and utter confusion was almost endearing, with his hair mussed up to the ceiling, eyes droopy and confused. Would have been endearing, if it weren't for the panic gnawing at Steve's gut.

“There's a public execution,” Steve explained in a rush.

Tony blinked, rolled a little further almost out of bed. Steve hauled him back to the center. “Is it me?” Tony's tone was sweetly nervous.

“I don't know who it is.” As Tony squirmed and Steve continued to try and keep him focused, Tony's sheet had slipped further down his body. Apparently he wasn't wearing anything at all to bed, shirt or otherwise. Steve kept his eyes firmly on Tony's.

“I think it might be Erskine,” Steve explained. Once he said the words aloud it suddenly seemed so foolish. He had no reason to think it was Erskine. All he'd heard was that _someone_ was going to be executed. No details other than that. And moreover, it had been on a radio station that aired locally—there was no way everyone's radios were picking up a signal from somewhere to the north of New Versailles. Actually, it was much more likely the person to be executed was Tony or one of his lackeys. Actually, now that he took a second to think about it, _Steve_ was more likely the target of the public execution than Erskine.

But in spite of all that, Steve had a gut feeling, and the warning from the Fates ringing in his ears from yesterday. Erskine was in trouble, or was going to be. The first public execution in twenty years was too much of a coincidence, surely.

Tony was waking up a little more now: running a hand through his hair, tugging the sheet back up to cover his hips. He held out a hand to Steve, an attempt at calming him down. “Okay, okay,” Tony said. His eyes were focused on the far corner of his bedroom, gears turning behind them. He turned back to Steve after a moment.

“Okay. First thing's first. Grab my radio.” Tony gestured across the room at a set of dresser drawers. “Second drawer from the top. Tune it to whatever station's got the news.”

As Steve turned and hurried to the dresser, Tony rolled out of bed and got to work pulling on some clothes. Steve found the radio just where Tony said it would be and snapped it on. His hands were shaking.

He had to tune through all the same stuff he had before, but he found a station playing news much faster this time.

“ _-at dawn. Again, that's ghetto number 1963_ ,” Steve sucked in a breath. That was this ghetto. At least that meant Erskine was probably out of danger, “ _at cross streets fifteen and nine_.”

“That's the main market,” Tony commented. He had come up behind Steve quietly and was now peering over his shoulder at the radio. He had on pants but was holding his shirt in his hands. The network of glowing blue lines that crisscrossed his chest was closer and clearer than Steve had ever seen it.

“Would we know if it was one of us?” Steve asked.

Tony nodded. “Whoever it is, they already have them in custody. They wouldn't be announcing this if they didn't. Don't want to make fools of themselves.” Tony hesitated, glanced up at Steve. “I've got some calls to make. You know where Sam is?”

Steve nodded. “He was in bed a couple hours ago. I was out for a jog when I heard the news.”

Tony slapped a hand to Steve's shoulder, ran it down his back before hurrying off across the room. “Call him,” Tony ordered. He tossed a phone across the room at Steve, who caught it deftly. “We need to get our ducks in a row. And keep the radio on. They'll say who it is sooner or later.”

Steve nodded and fumbled with the phone. After a moment he realized: “Sam doesn't have a phone.”

Tony rolled his eyes from where he was already cradling a phone against his ear. “Yeah, Luke. You and Jessica and the baby okay? Okay. Yeah. I'm calling him now. Stay inside. It's going to be a messy one.” Once he hung up and fingers were flying to dial another number, Tony told Steve: “Your apartment has one. Hang on- Hey, Danny. Yeah. You alright? Did you hear?” As Tony was talking to Danny he held up his hands at Steve, quickly signing the numbers to him. Steve obediently punched the numbers into the phone, then held it up to his ear. It was ringing.

“Um... hello?”

“Sam!” Steve breathed a sigh of relief.

“Steve? Uh. Did you know we had a phone this whole time?”

Steve laughed, a little bit hysterically. “No. No I didn't. Tony knew.”

“Of course _Tony_ knew.”

Steve ignored the way Sam emphasized Tony's first name—he was still calling him “Stark”, and couldn't get over how Steve's estimation of the man had gone up recently.

“Listen, Sam: there's going to be a public execution. Me and Tony are calling around, making sure it's no one we know.”

“Wait, hang on: It's two in the morning.”

Steve glanced over at Tony, who was still bare-chested with his shirt in one hand and the phone in his other, speaking rapidly at whoever was on the other end of the line. Steve turned away.

“Yeah...” Steve agreed slowly.

“Uh, you mind telling me what you're doing over at Stark's at two in the morning?”

Steve flushed faintly and turned away from Tony. “I wasn't _here_. I came here after I heard about the execution.”

“Right...”

“Sam, will you just- This is more important than who I'm fucking!” Steve growled into the phone.

“Whoa, okay, I'll come back later,” Tony said. Steve spun around to find Tony's hand out, as if about to tap him on the shoulder. Steve sighed and knocked the phone briefly against his forehead before returning it to his ear.

“Look Sam: I've got to go. From what we've heard there's going to be a public execution at dawn. We don't know who it is yet. Stay inside, keep your doors locked, and try not to do anything stupid.”

“You know me,” Sam replied, and Steve could hear the grin in his voice.

“Yeah, exactly: I know you,” Steve reminded him.

“Hey, same applies back to you,” Sam pointed out. “Don't let a pretty face and nice arms cloud your judgement. Keep your head down. Your peace, love, and happiness routine might work pretty good on a bunch of angry humans, but something tells me it's not gonna touch the cold mechanical hearts of a platoon of sentinels.”

“I've got you,” Steve replied. He hesitated for a moment, glancing at Tony, and then added: “And his arms aren't _that_ nice.”

Tony's beaming smile was worth the embarrassment and Sam yelling loud reprimands at Steve over the phone. Flushing hard, Steve hung up at turned his full attention to Tony. “Sam's safe. What do you need?”

“Make some calls for me.” Reaching out, Tony handed Steve an information card, a little digital piece of screen scrolling through names and numbers. Steve took the card, his fingers brushing against Tony's. He ignored the hopeful little look Tony was giving him. Now wasn't the time.

“Do odds. I'll do evens. Start with five?”

Steve nodded his understanding and the two men got back to work. The radio continued to mumble news at them, turned down low enough so they could hear their phone calls.

“ _Citizens are expected to attend. Dawn is at six fifteen._ ”

“Hello, Ms. Walters? … It's Steve Rogers. I apologize for calling at such a late hour, but I'm calling to make sure you and yours are okay. There's an execution happening in our ghetto- … Miami, yeah. Are your people accounted for? … You do that. Call Tony if there's any issues, yeah. …. No, we don't know who it is yet. … That's why we're calling, uh-huh. … And tell your people to stay indoors, stay out of trouble. ... You too. ... Stay safe, Ms. Walters.”

Dozens of phone calls later, and Steve had worked his way through his half of Tony's list. He thought Tony had, too. Though the man was still on the phone, the tone of his conversation had changed from informing and reassuring to sharp and questioning. He had switched over to trying to gather information that the radio wasn't telling them.

Steve found himself sitting on the edge of Tony's bed, listening to the radio cradled in his lap, watching Tony pace around his bedroom, bare-chested skin ripping over lean muscles as he gestured uselessly at the person on the phone. Exhaustion was starting to hit Steve suddenly, and he dozed, sitting upright with his chin bobbing down to his chest.

“ _... not releasing the name... from ghetto one nine, four nine. Repeat, word's in that the prisoner is from ghetto one nine, four nine_...”

Steve's head jerked upright, his eyes snapping open. One nine four nine. That was his ghetto. That was Brooklyn. Tony was heading toward him, hand outstretched and frozen, like a toad caught between the paws of a dog.

“That's Brooklyn,” were the first words out of Steve's mouth.

Tony's expression was pained. Steve's whole body felt like he was falling again, off the side of the skyscrapers of New Versailles, through the poisonous mist.

“It's Erskine, isn't it?” Steve breathed.

Tony's expression was contorted into something pained. “I... It's not a hundred percent...”

Steve's stomach plummeted through the floor. He jumped up, radio tumbling out of his lap to the floor. He clutched at Tony's shoulders. “It's Erskine?” The question came out too close to a sob.

Tony squinted in sympathy and placed his hands on Steve's shoulders. “I'm talking to people. Trying to figure something out.” His palms came up to cup at Steve's jaw. “We can't do anything stupid.”

Steve slapped Tony's hands away and started for the door, though he had no plan, no idea in his head aside from _Erskine, Erskine, Erskine_. He was the man who took Steve in, got him off the streets when his mother died. He fed Steve, gave him hormone injections to make him stronger, replaced his malnourished, sickly form with something that could be strong, could be useful. Erskine was the one who gave him his shield, who first told him about the storerooms in New Versailles, who outfitted him and Bucky with the supplies and information they needed to make their raids on New Versailles.

Tony was grabbing him, his hands on Steve's arms, pushing him back to the bed. “Steve. _Steve_. Listen to me.” Steve blinked, snapping part-way out of his daze.

Tony's eyes were boring into Steve's, hands on his face again, forcing him to look at him. “Steve. Listen to me. We don't know if it's him. And even if it is, we've got no plan. You can just go in there half-cocked with your shield on and expect to get out of there alive. From what I hear, there's a _platoon_ of sentinels guarding whoever this is. It's big business, Steve. They're expecting no less than a full-frontal assault.”

“We have to get to him,” Steve told Tony urgently. “We can't just leave him to die.”

Tony's face twisted up in pain. “We might have to.”

Steve shoved Tony off him, hard, before making a break for the door. But when he reached it he stopped, hands wrapped around the doorframe, head hanging low. What was he going to do? He didn't even know where they were keeping Erskine, didn't even know if it was him... Tony was right. He was half-cocked and wasn't going to succeed at doing anything besides getting himself killed. Steve knocked his head against the door and trembled.

“Steve.” Tony's hands were on his shoulders, pulling him away from the door. “Let me do my thing. Call in some favors. Get all the facts. Then we'll see what we can do.”

Slowly Steve nodded his head, letting himself get pulled away from the door. He turned to Tony, blinking back frustrated tears. “Can you just... give me something to do? Anything at all.”

Tony smiled sadly. “Sure thing. Gimme a second.” Tony flipped through his data card for a second, then stopped. “Okay, call these three numbers. Tell them you're calling on behalf of me. Get whatever information you can. Promise anything. I'll deliver.”

Steve nodded and took the card from Tony. Calling around, gather information. He could do that. For a little while, at least.

Dawn was two and a half hours out by the time Tony and Steve had managed to pin down that it _was_ Erskine about to be executed. His crimes were listed on the sentinels' database as possessing a prosthetic (which he _didn't_ , Steve had cried out angrily), aiding and abetting fugitives, conspiracy to commit treason, stock piling weapons, stealing rations from government vehicles, and on and on like that. It was only Tony's constant reassurances and pleading that kept Steve pacing around his bedroom instead of out on the streets, making a break for the makeshift prison himself.

“What are you doing?” Steve asked impatiently as Tony picked up the phone for the thousandth time that night.

Rather than being snappish back at Steve, which he rightfully deserved, Tony just held out a patient hand at Steve. “Hey Sue? ... It's Tony. Sorry for calling at such a late hour. Or early. ... Listen, I need you and your prosthetic. …. You know I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important. … An execution. A public execution. … Alright, see you soon.”

Tony turned to Steve as soon as he hung up. “Sue Storm. I did some prosthetic work for her a few years back. Light bending. She can turn herself invisible. With a few modifications I can strengthen the distortion field: make it so that she can turn a group of us invisible, and not just on the visible light spectrum.”

Steve forced himself to take a calming breath. Tony had a plan. A good plan. “Thank you,” he breathed.

Tony's grin was more worried than not. He ran a hand through his sleep-tousled hair and glanced away from Steve. “Yeah, well. Don't go thanking me yet. I don't have blueprints, I don't have a plan...”

Steve stepped forward and pressed his hands to Tony's shoulders. “You've already done more than enough. Honestly. Thank you.”

Steve's thumbs came up to rub at Tony's jaw. Tony was watching him, big eyes curious and hopeful, even if they were bloodshot thanks to lack of sleep. Tony's mouth opened slightly, like he was going to say something, but then he just stopped: lips slightly parted, gazing up at Steve like he was waiting for something. Or maybe asking for something.

“Mr. Stark?”

Happy was poking his head through Tony's doorway. Steve dropped his hands from Tony's shoulders, stepped back to put some space between them. He glanced down and away, catching Tony doing the same out of the corner of his eye. Whatever Happy had interrupted, whatever might have happened, now was not the time. It might never be the time: not until Steve fought the good fight, not until he had given everything of himself for others could he think of taking so much so selfishly.

Tony's hands were on his hips when he lifted his head and nodded. “Yeah. Happy?”

Tony strode out of the room, leaving Steve alone in his bedroom. Steve took another breath, then followed after him. He noticed as he left that Tony's bright red coat was left behind, hung over a desk chair in the corner of Tony's bedroom. It would probably be too conspicuous for whatever they were doing tonight, as it was. Which reminded Steve that he was still in his running clothes. Steve stepped into the main office he saw Tony and Happy were conferring quietly over a tabletop display built into Tony's desk.

“Tony?”

Tony turned absently towards Steve, hands still tracing patterns in the digital lines of the desktop. “Yeah?”

Steve tugged at his sweatpants that he was still wearing from his late-night run. “Change of clothes?” he asked. Tony glanced back at him, then smiled.

“I'll buzz Pepper down to bring you something more appropriate for breaking into a make-shift government prison.”

Ten minutes later, and Steve was feeling much more ready to execute Tony's plan, whatever it might be. Miss Potts had found him some cargo pants and a long-sleeved shirt, in addition to a navy blue jacket about a thousand times nicer and more serviceable than the patched up one he had back at his apartment with Sam. Steve wasn't sure where she had found the clothes—it wasn't like he and Tony were even close to the same size—but he was grateful for the loan.

A knock at the door announced the presence of this Sue Storm. When Happy cleared her and let her in, Steve saw that she was a petite blonde woman, the same age as him or maybe a couple years older. Behind her was a young man, younger looking than her, with spiky blonde hair and a cock-sure smile that Steve thought wouldn't look out of place on a younger version of Tony Stark.

“Sue, thanks for coming. Johnny, you stay away from my bamboo stairs.” Tony rushed forward to pull Sue into a hug and shake Johnny's hand, before tugging Sue aside and getting to work. That left Steve with Johnny. Steve shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked on the balls of his feet, not sure what to do.

Luckily, Johnny was more friendly than Steve. He stepped forward with a crooked grin and held out his hand. “Johnny Storm. Sue's baby brother.” Steve stuck out his hand to shake, then yanked it back when something burned it.

Johnny was laughing as he held up his hands, palm-forward. Steve watched in fascination as flames erupted from Johnny's hands, then disappeared. “Friction prosthetic,” Johnny explained. “Excites atoms until they bust into flames. Anywhere outside a vacuum, I can make a fire. Saw what you did over at Jennifer's. Looks like we're glowing-palm prosthetic buddies.”

“You were there?” Steve asked.

A funny look came over Johnny, like he had just realized something decidedly screwy. “No,” he finally said, and left it at that.

“Alright, Steve?” Tony called out.

With one last look at the way Johnny was staring funny at him, Steve turned and went over to Tony. He was wrist-deep in some prosthetic spread across Sue's back. Sue was lying there shirtless on Tony's desk, head pillowed on her arms. She smiled at Steve as he came over.

“Good morning, Steve. I'm Sue. It's a pleasure to finally meet you.” She lifted her head enough to stick out a hand for Steve to shake. Steve took it gingerly, focus more on the mess of wires and circuits spilling out from her back. He didn't miss out on the strange “finally” Sue interjected in her welcome, but chose to ignore it. There were bigger things at work than the way his reputation was apparently preceding him.

Tony's mouth was clamped tight around a screwdriver, grimacing as he poked and prodded inside Sue with both hands. He nodded at Steve, then managed to mumble out around the screwdriver: “Pass me that wire. No, the blue.”

Steve's hand hesitated over a glowing blue wire, looking more like a strip of light or electricity than something solid. He glanced over at Tony for confirmation, who nodded impatiently. Carefully Steve reached for the wire. It didn't electrocute or burn him when he touched his fingertips to it, so he picked it up and handed it to Tony. Steve watched in awe as Tony deftly worked it into Sue's back, fingers playing with connections he couldn't see, beneath layers of skin and circuitry. Tony's gaze was up and off to the side, one eye closed in concentration. There was a long, tense moment during which Steve held his breath as Tony's hands moved minutely, and the rest of him was still. Sue seemed unconcerned by the tension in the room—though maybe that was entirely on Steve and no one else felt it. Maybe because Sue and Johnny knew that Tony was just that good.

“There!” Tony removed his hands with a triumphant grin. “Alright, try it out.”

One second Tony was standing there, grinning to himself above Sue Storm's bare back. The next second, he and Sue were both... gone. Just. _Gone_.

“Tony!” Steve shouted before he could stop himself. In the blink of an eye Tony was back, laughing.

“I guess it worked,” Sue said with a smile. She turned her head back on her arms. “You weren't touching me, right?”

“Nope!” Tony popped the “p”, rolling on the balls of his feet. He was obviously quite proud of himself.

“I'll have to try it out later with the kids and Reed, get a real sense of how to control it, but it should be good enough for now.” Sue waved a hand back at Tony. “Stitch me up before the anesthetic wears off.”

Tony bent over Sue and got to work, wasting no more time reveling in his success. Steve was grateful for that, though he got the idea that whatever Tony had just managed to do modifying Sue's prosthetic was truly impressive to a non-layman.

“I'll even do you one better,” Tony promised Sue as he worked, his fingers flying over her back as they replaced the spilled guts of wires and circuits neatly into her back, woven into muscle and beneath skin, “I'll give you an extra shot of anesthetic so you can get through this morning without falling over on us. It's gonna be a bitch tomorrow, though.”

Sue shrugged nonchalantly, the movement in the muscles of her upper back fading into the circuitry and exposed muscles of her mid-back, where Tony was still working. “The pain will be worth it. I've been asking for these upgrades for forever and a day, you know.”

Tony's tongue was sticking out of the corner of his mouth as we worked. The artificial components were almost all buried away again in Sue's back. As Steve watched, Tony nudged the last piece of wire in its place, then reached for a cold laser suture. Steve winced and glanced away. For some reason the process always seemed more disturbing to him than low-tech stitches.

“You can't rush genius,” Tony chastised as he worked. “You realize I had to basically rediscover and then figure out a way to mechanically exploit quantum entanglement for this upgrade, right? So excuse me for not managing it until just now.”

A lock of Sue's blonde hair fell over her shoulder, slashing a line over her cheek as she tilted her head back at Tony and smiled. “So you just happened to have a scientific breakthrough the night you needed my upgraded prosthetic to help you with a prison break?”

“What can I say,” Tony mumbled around a spanner in his mouth. “Necessity begets invention. Alright, Mrs. Fantastic. You're good to go.”

Steve breathed a silent sigh of relief as Tony stepped away from Sue, tucking the cold laser suture behind his ear. Sue sat up and flexed, feeling at the muscles in her back. She smiled over at Tony. “Can't feel anything yet. Perfect.” Leaning forward, Sue picked up her bra and shirt off the table before shucking them on quickly. She smiled primly as she flipped her medium-length blonde hair out of her shirt. Pressing her hands to the table, she leaned forward and asked “Alright: what's the plan?”

Tony clapped his hands together, wide grin doing nothing to hide his nervousness. “Right. Here's how it's going to go.” Tony brought his palms apart and the room dimmed, then lit up with computer screens set into his walls. Steve crossed his arms and closed his mouth, listening and looking, absorbing every inch of detail Tony was throwing at them. This was their one chance to save Erskine—two hours from now, he'd be dead. Unless these few people managed to do something about it first.

They managed to wrap up in fifteen minutes—more time would be better, but they were already running out. Their small group headed out the door: just Steve, Tony, Sue, and Johnny. Rhodey and Sam were both on alert as back-up, but Tony had felt the smaller the group of people, the better. Especially since they were relying on Sue's almost entirely untested invisibility prosthetic to keep them all under the sentinels' radar.

Johnny had his arm wrapped around his big sister's petite shoulders as they headed out the door together, out into the cool, pre-dawn night. Steve was just behind them, but found himself hesitating.

“You okay?” Tony asked. He paused in the doorway, hand reaching for Steve's elbow.

“Yeah.” Even though time was precious, Steve took a beat look after Sue and Johnny, hurrying down the bamboo steps and out into the street. “Just: that's the second pair of siblings we've seen in as many days,” Steve explained. “Wanda and Pietro, Sue and Johnny. And now we're going to try and save Erskine, and...” Steve sighed, tilting his head up towards the sky. A couple dim stars twinkled back at him through the ever-present smog that hung over the ghettos.

“I miss Bucky,” he whispered. Afraid he'd said too much, made the mistake of being too vulnerable, Steve glanced over at Tony. But the other man was just looking at him, waiting patiently for him to continue. So he did. “Sam's great and all. My best friend. But Bucky was more than that: he was my brother, in everything but blood.”

Tony nodded his understanding. After a beat, he reached out and pressed a hand to Steve's shoulder, squeezing tight. “Then let's try and go protect the family you've got left.”

Steve smiled winningly at Tony, a surge of gratitude going through him. Tony _got it_. Tony understood. He hurried down the bamboo steps, after Tony and Sue and Jonny. Tony whistled at the group and twirled his finger in the air, indicating for them to follow. From there he ducked under the overhang in his building, onto the first level. Steve didn't even know what took place on this level: a storefront, he thought. Where the every day dealings for Stark's smuggling empire took place.

Pepper was waiting inside the lower storefront for them, her hand on a stack of clothes piled high on a table next to her. Her pretty freckled face was drawn tight, red lips in a thin line as she started to hand out clothes. “Mr. Storm: fire-retardant suit. Mrs. Storm: something a little more inconspicuous.”

Sue and Johnny quickly shucked the clothes they had worn over to Tony's and slipped into the items given to them. Johnny tested his by lighting his entire arm on fire, then putting himself out. He beamed gleefully when the suit was undamaged. While Sue was still gingerly zipping up hers, Johnny lit himself up again. His smile was etched in harsh relief from the glow of his auto-conflagration.

“Alright, Johnny, lights out.” Tony swiped a gesture through the hair with his index finger. Johnny sighed but obeyed, putting himself out. Tony continued on to explain: “Like the upgrade I gave your sister, this new flame-retardant suit is untested. It should work in short bursts, but exposed to fire for longer periods of time I don't know what it'll do.”

Johnny groaned petulantly, but put himself out. Sue was making herself invisible and then visible again, arms held out in front of her so she could check the process. Something occurred to Steve:

“How can your eyes still work when you're invisible?” he asked.

Sue opened her mouth to answer, but Tony pushed between them and waved his hand impatiently. “Science. Remind me to tell you when Erskine is safe.”

Steve shut his mouth and clenched his jaw. Right. Erskine.

Tony pressed his hand to Pepper's shoulder as he passed her and whispered something in her ear. She nodded, grim-faced and tight lipped. Tony dropped a kiss on her cheek and squeezed her shoulder, then moved past to the backroom. Steve followed, with Sue and Johnny trailing after. In the backroom, Tony grabbed a crowbar off the shelf, then glanced over at Steve. “Some light?”

Steve nodded, bringing his hands together quickly. His shield expanded in his palms and then stopped, contained in a small circle of light, not much bigger than a ration tin. He held his palms out to Tony, at the manhole cover he was crouched over. Tony made quick work of the cover with his crowbar, then tossed it to Steve. “You'll do more damage with it than me,” Tony explained. Steve tucked the crowbar into his belt loops on his cargos and didn't think about how easily his stomach was sitting at the thought of hurting someone for the sake of Erskine. The time for judging whatever actions they would commit this morning was later.

Tony lowered himself into the manhole, feet searching beneath him carefully before he found secure purchase on the ladder leading down. He glanced up at Steve and winked. Then he disappeared into the darkness beneath their feet, scurrying his way down the ladder.

Steve followed next, light from his shield expanding as he gripped the rungs of the ladder on the way down, then bringing his palms together again at the bottom to coalesce it into a smaller, less noticeable circle. He held his hands up in Tony's direction, looking for his expression in the twilight darkness. In the cutting light of Steve's shield Tony's features were thrown in sharp relief, shadows under his eyes like dark smudges, sorrowful lines cut from his nose down to his lips, from his eyes to his cheeks. He flashed a quick smile at Steve when he caught him looking, but if anything it made him look even older. More tired. More weighted down.

“Ready for this?”

Steve nodded, steel hardening in his stomach. He was ready for anything—except losing Erskine. Tony's expression flickered, softened, and he opened his mouth like he was going to say something. But then Johnny and Sue were splashing down into the wet tunnel behind Steve, and Tony snapped his mouth shut, shaking his head. For later, then.

Tony led the way, knowing the infrastructure of the ghetto better than anybody else. Steve tried to keep track, to paint a mental map in his head, but the darkness was tricky and the sewers seemed to follow a plan entirely different from the one the streets above followed. It was like traveling the negative of a city that didn't exist anymore.

Steve thought it wouldn't be too distracting for him to ask, so he did. “These sewers: they predate your ghetto, don't they?”

Tony held a finger up, ticking off a point in Steve's favor. “Point to the pretty young man.” Steve flushed, but Tony's words were lacking any of the flirtatious tone they usually carried. The compliment was paid to him absently, with no happy intent behind it.

“These sewers date back to the twenty-second century,” he explained. “Some of them before that, even: twenty-first, maybe a few of the main legs as old as the twentieth. They're not even used for sewage, now.” Tony's words took on an edge. “The infrastructure up top isn't advanced enough to utilize them, almost anywhere. My apartments, they drill into here. My home and business. No one much else uses them.”

Steve nodded. No one else had indoor plumbing—not in a way that would utilize this massive sewer tunnel. Just some pipes to dump the waste outside, to the nearest road or river. He glanced ahead at Tony, who was striding as quickly through the shin-deep water as he could. The lines of his back were tense and unhappy. Steve glanced up at the twenty-foot tall ceilings arching over his head.

“I can't imagine any number of apartments or offices you, or anyone, could build to need a sewage system this massive,” he commented.

Tony stayed quiet for a moment, the sloshing echoes of their footsteps his only response. Behind Steve, Sue and Johnny were staying quiet.

“Once upon a time there were more cities than just New Versailles,” Tony sighed, tone mournful. “This ghetto wasn't always a ghetto. It was once a city, too.” Ahead of Steve, Tony's hands trailed along the damp masonry, fingertips making a faint scraping sound against the stone. His next sentence was so faint Steve wasn't sure it was meant to be heard, but the acoustics of the tunnels magnified the soft-spoken words until Steve could just make them out: “It could be a city again.”

They fell to silence after that. Steve waded through the murky water with a newfound respect, mind cast far afield trying to imagine the society that would have needed such a place. He knew that surely a city as large and grand as New Versailles would require such a system, but he couldn't imagine dozens of cities like that, hundreds. Couldn't imagine what that would mean for the people living in such a city: millions of people in houses of stone and steel. Millions of people fed, clothed, at work and _living_ , instead of just surviving. Millions—maybe even billions.

Steve held his breath and then let it out, casting his eyes to the ceiling. He whispered a quiet prayer to the hands that had built these sewers in the past, the need that had motivated them. That such a need might arise in the future. That his and Tony's work today and in the months that followed wouldn't be in vain. That one day so many people would have running water in their homes and offices that such a sewer might be useful again.

Their path grew slightly uphill, to Steve's thighs. He couldn't quite be certain in the dark and the standing water they were wading through, but he thought he was right. They were headed for the main market space, crossroads fifteen and nine. The sewers were widening as they went, becoming bigger and grander. The paths which branched off the one they were walking were becoming bigger themselves. It made sense: this ghetto's main market was a big thing, a handful of actual stone and mortar buildings at its heart rather than the typical aluminum, tin, and bamboo shacks that almost every building other thank Tony's were made from. It must have been a city center centuries ago, back before the cities that Tony claimed once existed as plentiful as prosthetics in the ghettos had been lost to poverty and hopelessness.

Tony came to a stop some twenty minutes into their trek, before a ladder which led up a considerable ways, compared to the eight-foot drop or so that had been their entrance to the sewer system. Without a word back to the others, Tony went up to the ladder, tapping at it, then the stone around it. He glanced up once or twice, eyes squinting towards the almost indescribable ceiling above their heads.

“Do you need more light?” Steve asked.

Tony shook his head and pressed a finger to his lips. Steve fell obediently silent. If they were at their destination, there would be sentinels about. Tony wasn't wrong to call for quiet.

Just as Steve was growing impatient with Tony's puttering about, Tony stopped and turned toward the wall, head bent, and went still. Steve thought maybe he heard something and tensed, eyes casting about for danger. But then, in the stillness of the sewer, Tony began to _glow_.

His veins lit up, a pulsing, electric blue. Except it wasn't his veins, not actually: it was that prosthetic he had, the one no one could say what it was or what it did. The one that looked like a network of wires, converging in the center of his chest over his heart. His clockwork heart—so the rumors cruelly accused.

But now, whatever mystery that prosthetic contained was slowly unraveling before Steve's very eyes. Tony's veins were glowing, his tilted face bathed in electric blue light. As the glow grew brighter Steve could see from the side of Tony's face that his eyes were closed, his forehead furrowed deeply in concentration (or maybe even pain). Even when the spiderweb network of blue across his neck, arms, and chest stopped increasing in brightness, that central ball in the middle of his chest kept glowing, brighter and brighter, until Steve had to shut his eyes against it lest he lose what little night vision he had left.

Steve knew the second the process, whatever it was, stopped. All the air felt like it had been sucked out of the room and then swept back in, though not a hair on his head stirred. It was like the silence before a bomb and then the noise of the explosion, even though there was no sound. A deep breath before a scream and then the hoarse-throated shout, though his mouth stayed shut and no sound escaped from him or any other in his party. Steve's eyes blinked open and went straight for Tony. He was standing there like nothing had happened, except for the palm pressed against his chest.

“It's this one,” Tony confirmed. “Johnny, you're on perimeter. Get your ass up two blocks down. Just count the exits. No flaming unless we're already blown.” Johnny flicked a smoldering little salute, two fingers flaring up like embers at the bottom of a fireplace before flickering back to flesh. He was off wading his way through the sewer without a glance back. Tony nodded at Sue next. Steve knew what was coming, so he let his shield go out, the absence of light throwing them into near-complete darkness, punctuated only by the faint blue glow that Tony's prosthetic always gave off. “You're up first. Keep us unseen.”

Sue nodded and started up the ladder, flickering into invisibility as Steve and Tony stared up after her. The climb was long—thirty or forty feet, if Steve had to guess. It reminded him of another climb, one fateful one that had started all this, led him to this point. He trembled slightly, before pushing his shoulders back and tightening his jaw.

“I didn't want to say this earlier, but you know this is one mad genius short of being a suicide mission,” Tony whispered over to Steve.

Steve glanced at Tony, then turned back to staring up in the direction of Sue's soft movements against the metal ladder. “I know. Thank you for trying.”

“Hey.” Tony's hand was on the back of Steve's neck. The hatch above them opened, Sue slipping through it invisibly. This was it. Now was the time they'd get caught out: a sentinel could be waiting above the sewer entrance. Invisible or not, a manhole opening itself was impossible to miss. Especially with robot eyes and sensors.

Still, Steve found himself looking over at Tony, attention drawn to him completely in a way that was impossible to ignore. Tony's eyes flickered down Steve's face just a second, and then he was pulling Steve in, pressing a firm, desperate kiss to his lips. Steve kissed back without question or hesitation.

“For luck,” Tony breathed as they parted.

Before Steve had a chance to recover or respond, Sue was calling down to them: a little trilling whistle. Tony released Steve and hurried to the ladder, scaling it deftly. Steve shook himself and moved to follow, lips still wet from his kiss.

Steve climbed through the manhole cover in short order. He looked around the room, assessing it quickly with a strategic eye. It was a small room, no bigger than eight by eight. Nothing much was in there besides stone walls and a couple of wooden crates and odds and ends. Some wires, some scraps of metal and plastic spilled their way out of the boxes and across the floor. A heavy layer of dust coated everything. That was good—that meant the chances of someone stumbling across them because they were popping in to grab something from this room was negligible. Completely unlike the storeroom in New Versailles, which saw heavy foot traffic daily.

There was one window in the room, opposite the one door leading out. The window was set into the thick masonry of the building, glass cracked and yellowed with age, cloudy to the point of near opaqueness. Not that there was likely much to see out it at the moment, with the dark of predawn still sitting heavily over the ghetto. The door across from the window was solid wood, heavy and impermeable.

Steve turned to get a better look at the door, but before he took another step stopped, finding himself subjected to the curious experience of being turned completely invisible. He could still see—and he _was_ going to ask Tony about that, if they made it out of this—but his limbs were invisible to his own eyes, not to mention Sue and Tony's forms. Steve reached out blindly and bumped into something warm and solid.

“That'd be me.” Tony's voice was close. Steve flushed and pulled his hand back, grateful that for once Tony couldn't see it.

Sue's voice came from his right. “I'm in the northeast corner. I'll stay here while you boys do your work.”

Steve nodded, then remembered that he couldn't be seen. “Right,” he said aloud. He moved forward for the window, then stopped when he bumped into something invisible. Tony laughed, his hands pushing blindly at Steve's torso. Steve's stomach jumped when Tony's fingers brushed against the wrong spot, and he had to stifle a giggle.

Steve stepped back and watched as invisible hands wiped at the window, clearing it enough to see out of. He looked through it with Tony, feeling the heat from the other man's body and the brush of his sleeves.

They were surprisingly high up—though maybe it shouldn't be so surprising, given the distance they had to climb on the ladder to reach this room. Three stories up, from what Steve could estimate, overlooking the marketplace at the intersection of fifteen and nine. They were in one of the half-dozen stone buildings which occupied the marketplace, making it the closest thing to a city center the ghetto had.

Sentinels stomped about, in the darkness beyond the window pane. Their great hulking forms, two stories tall and as wide as two ghetto homes, they shook the ground beneath them with their steps. Their searchlights scanned the area, their speakers blaring notices from the government in New Versailles. _“Public execution. Public execution at intersection fifteen and nine, ghetto one nine six three. Public execution._ ” One great sentinel passed just by their window, light from his shoulder searchlights passing directly through the space Steve and Tony were occupying in the window. Steve's spine turned to liquid, then steel. His ungloved palms clenched around the stone ledge around the window. They were not taking another person from Steve, these great mechanical monsters of the elite. These would be the first walls Steve tore down, by snatching their quarry out from under their noses.

“How are we going to find Erskine?” Steve asked Tony. “You said it would be clear when you saw them.” Steve glanced out at the sentinels, walking patterns around the square. “Is it?”

A long pause. Steve wished they weren't invisible, so that he could try and read the expression on Tony's face. Finally, Tony replied: “Not yet. Give me a minute.”

Even though he couldn't see it, Steve got the feeling Tony was utilizing the thing in his chest again, consulting it for whatever use it was. Steve waited in the quiet, shivering as he watched the sentinels make their rounds. There _was_ a pattern to them, but to Steve's eye it looked like a standard crowd-control sweep, with the square as the center. There were no epicycles of troops coming off the main circle that might be indicative of a holding cell, a place where extra guards were needed to watch over Erskine.

Suddenly Tony drew in a sharp breath next to Steve.

“We got the wrong information,” Tony said in a rush of air. Steve tensed, palms crackling with the need to do something, to fight back.

“What do you mean?”

“He's already out there,” Tony explained. He was moving past Steve, footsteps racing over to the door to throw it open. Steve followed him out into the hallway, Sue clambering after them both, keeping her invisibility up on all three.

It was odd pursuing someone by sound rather than sight, an adjustment that Steve had to make quickly but left him stumbling over his own feet at every turn. Sue sounded like she was managing better than him, keeping pace just behind his left shoulder. Then again, she probably had practice with it—or maybe she just had better ears than Steve.

“What do you mean he's already out there?” Steve whispered after Tony. The footsteps in front of him slowed, then turned down another hallway. Running after them, Steve held one hand out blindly, searching for the faintest wisp of Tony. His fingertips caught on some material and he lunged forward, grabbing himself a solid handful of Tony's shirt. It was awkward, running forward while holding onto Tony, but at least now Steve didn't feel like he was going to lose him at every turn.

“I think the sentinels already have Erskine out in the square,” Tony explained.

“Did you see him?” Steve's heart pounded in his chest like a mob's fists against the walls of New Versailles: useless but insistent, a sea of helplessness rising up within him and breaking against his ribcage.

“No, but-” Tony's voice faltered, the sound of his panting breaths and running feet over the stone floors of the building the only thing filling Steve's ears above the sound of his own racing heart. “I think he is. Know it. It's... the math adds up.”

“But he'll be exposed,” Steve argued. It wasn't that he didn't want it to be true: it didn't make _sense_. Tactically, that was. Why leave the prisoner in a disclosed location, out in the open, an hour before execution? Even if they were certain he couldn't be freed, he could be killed, assassinated. If someone had a mind to, they could take the execution out of New Versailles' hands. It'd be almost as great a blow as freeing the man. Unless...

Another turned corner, and Steve skidded to a halt, tugging Tony backwards into his chest. Sue slid to a stop next to them, panting off to Steve's right.

Before them was an open door, the main entrance to the building they were in. Out beyond it, not ten feet away, a sentinel stomped its big metallic boots, gears whirring terribly, searchlights going right through the three of them as it swept the perimeter. “ _Public execution!_ ” its terrible speakers roared. “ _Public execution at intersection fifteen and nine, ghetto one nine six three. Public execution!_ ” And then, as Steve stood there and clutched a heavy-breathing Tony to him, something new: “ _Public execution in three hundred seconds. Public execution in two hundred ninety seconds. Public execution!”_

Beyond the sentinel, through his tree-trunk legs as they trudged and paced their way around the square, Steve saw him. He saw Erskine, tied up and waiting in the darkness. He was a distance away, but fear or shock or _something_ gave Steve's eyes clarity like he had never experienced before. Erskine's grey curly hair was askew, his face bloodied and beaten. His body had a slump to it, injuries that he was nursing, toes and ribs and fingers that he was favoring. But he still stood, head up, eyes shining out into the darkness. Waiting.

Steve let go of Tony. He faced where he thought Sue was standing and told her: “You can drop the invisibility on me.” Then he turned and was off, running through the halls of this old building, on his own.

He thought maybe Tony called out after him, but Steve was already too far away to catch more than a whisper of his voice. His legs were racing, his lungs moving gallons of air to his blood, his heart pump pump pumping solidly away in his chest. This body, this strength and ability: it was all thanks to Erskine. Steve would never have had the strength to do what little good he had managed in his short life if it weren't for Erskine. He'd given Steve the ability, given him the means to achieve the ends that before had just been daydreams, trapped inside a body too frail to be good for anything other than a burden.

Steve stopped and looked around. His feet had carried him back to the room they had started, with its dusty window and odds and ends. Steve made for the window. With one quick motion he brought his palms together, then tore them apart. His shield flared outward from them, slamming through the window and taking it and a sizable chunk of the wall around it with it. Without pause Steve threw himself through the window, heavy boots landing on the second story roof which sat just below it.

There were a dozen sentinels in the square, now. Steve tracked their movements for a second, watching where they were going. His eyes mapped the location of all the sentinels and buildings in the market square. Then he took off sprinting, roof tiles sliding beneath his feet to crack on the ground three stories below him as he ran. He reached the edge of the first roof in seconds. A sentinel was just making the turn from North to West in its patrol. Without hesitation Steve threw himself off the roof, shield held out in front of him. With a roar that would send the whole of New Versailles running, Steve brought his shield down on the sentinel's neck. A crack like thunder rent the early-morning air as the metal of the sentinel's casing split like ripened fruit beneath his shield of light.

Alarms blared immediately, the full force of the sentinel patrols turning to him. Steve rode the sentinel down to the ground, its screaming calls of warning bringing a half-dozen of its brothers upon Steve before his feet hit the ground.

Steve jumped from the sentinel's body and took off running, boots still wet from the sewer carving blisters into his feet as they pounded over the stone of the marketplace. The city square was illuminated clear as day, all the sentinels' searchlights turned inward and blazing, so hot and bright that Steve's golden shield was almost invisible, swallowed up in the light.

Erskine was ahead of Steve, maybe by eighty yards. Even from that distance Steve could see Erskine's head turning towards him, looking out through the blinding lights of the sentinels to see what was the cause of the the howling of twisted metal.

Behind Steve, the sentinel he had just taken down was sputtering and crackling, mechanical guts spilled out into the market square, artificial life still struggling to press on. Ahead of Steve, what felt like a world away, Erskine's head was fixed on him, gaze zeroed in on Steve's movements. His mouth was open, moving, but Steve couldn't hear what he was saying. What mattered was Erskine was alive still, and Steve was too. His body was electric, like he had eaten the heart of his enemy and gained its mechanical endurance, its charged energy.

Another sentinel stepped in Steve's immediate path, plasma rays fixed on him. Instinctively Steve held up his shield, not even sure if it would work against that type of energy. The sentinel fired and Steve kept moving forward, golden light spread out before him like a seashore. The plasma rays crashed over it, over him, breaking against his shield and crashing out again, momentum redirected. A sentinel to his left went down, body melting and crackling under the force of its own weapons. Steve continued to charge forward, footsteps pounding inexorably over the pavers of the market square.

Up ahead, a new movement caught his eye. Erskine's bonds were falling away from him, as if by some invisible hand. Abruptly Steve changed the direction of his movement, running away from Erskine. If Tony and Sue were with him, that was good enough. They'd get him to safety. Steve just needed to draw the sentinels' fire long enough to make sure-

A scream. Steve stumbled over his own feet, twisting around trying to locate the source. The sentinels, apparently, had figured out Steve's less-than-subtle plan. Two had turned back to Erskine, who was not yet freed, and had their guns trained on him. Both were powering up.

“ _No_!” Steve shouted. But it was too late. The air grew hot around him as the plasma blasts fired. Erskine was looking right at Steve, chin up and back straight, until a blinding whiteness enveloped him. Only his after image was left when the blasts ceased.

“ _No_!” Steve screamed again. His shield fell from him, force of will that had been keeping it up long gone. Erskine was gone— _gone_ like he had never existed, not a scrap of matter left in the place where he had stood. Steve stood dumbly, hands by his sides, jaw slack, body numb.

“ _Move_!” A voice hissed behind him. Tony's voice, Steve's mind registered a beat late.

Tony's hands were on him, pulling at his jacket, at his shoulders, at his arms. Steve tore his gaze away from the spot where Erskine had stood just seconds earlier. He couldn't see. Everything was blurry, everything was gone, he couldn't... he was crying. Steve stumbled forwards into Tony, feet barely working as he was pulled and shoved and tugged along, back into the building they had come through.

Behind him, a flash of light—different wholly from the light which made up Steve's shield. He turned to stare at it, not hearing Tony's shouts to _keep moving_ , _come on_!

Blasting out of one of the other buildings which surrounded the square was a jet of fire, almost white with the intensity of its heat. A blur of red and gold filled a window, a corona of rage and flames and righteous fury. Johnny Storm, Sue's brother, was focusing his heat blasts on the sentinels intensely enough on their metal plating that they were turning red, then white with the heat. As Steve watched, the first sentinel Johnny was focused on started to melt, the smallest bit of its metal shell liquifying before the intensity of his vengeance.

“ _Steve_!”

Steve was being pulled backwards, yanked. Johnny's fires filled his eyes, but two sets of hands hauled him out of the square, into the dark and drafty building where they had come in.

They were down and running in the sewers before Steve came back to himself, some of the shock wearing off. In its wake came anger, and a deep, permeating sense of hopelessness. He gritted his teeth and continued, one foot in front of the other. Erskine was dead. Gone. New Versailles had obliterated the closest thing Steve had ever known to a father this morning. Steve blinked, eyes bleary in the dim light of his shield. He hadn't even remembered bringing his hands together to light their way. Most of his movements were thanks to instinct more so than anything else.

Ten minutes into their plodding, soaking race through the tunnels, a bright light, redder and more fickle than the light of Steve's shield. Sue, visible now and blonde hair plastered to her face from their damp journey, spun around at the first flicker of orange light on the tunnel walls. She shoved past Steve and Tony, pushing Tony so hard he fell into Steve. Steve's arms automatically came up to catch Tony, holding him against his chest.

“You _idiot_!” Sue hissed, throwing herself into her brother's arms and gripping him tight. Johnny's flame flickered out as she leapt, leaving Steve's shield as the singular light in the sewer once again. His face was splotched with soot, forehead tight with exhaustion, but as he held Sue close his eyes closed and he relaxed into her embrace.

“Come on,” Steve grumbled. He hefted Tony upright, putting him back on his own two feet from where he had been leaning heavily against Steve's chest. Steve turned back forward and started walking, ball of light held aloft in one hand as he walked. He didn't wait to see if Tony or the Storm siblings were following him. Rapid splashing signaled Tony's rush to draw level with Steve again. Sue and Johnny followed a few feet behind. Steve kept plodding forward, as quickly as he could. There was no way of telling where the sentinels were, or if they would pick up their trail. Their best bet was to get back to Tony's offices and then scatter. Keep their heads down and hope. For what little hope was worth, anymore.

“They changed the rules.” It was just a whisper, at first, from Steve's right. He ignored it, until Tony repeated, louder and with a touch of hysteria: “They changed the _rules_.”

“Keep moving,” Steve gritted out.

“It was supposed to be black bags,” Tony explained, desperate. “It was supposed to be black bags and relocation. Felon colonies. Black bags and executions inside the walls, if that didn't work.” Tony's voice was raising until he was almost shouting, voice high and whiney. It was almost childish, the shock he carried with him as they pushed through the shin-high waters of the sewers.

Steve spared a glance for Tony as they hurried. His face was white in the pure light of Steve's shield, ashen-hued. The lines under his eyes were sunken, something like a thousand-yard stare starting to form there. Reaching out an arm, Steve grabbed at Tony and pulled him ahead, just a little. Just enough so that Steve could keep an eye on him.

“It was _dawn_ ,” Tony continued as if they weren't fleeing for their lives. “It was _dawn_ , and they _changed it_!”

“It's what they do,” Steve growled in frustration—with Tony or New Versailles, he couldn't say which was irritating him more.

“They changed the rules.”

Their boots squelched in the shin-deep water as they forged ahead, as quick as they could. Steve's countenance was frozen, grim and cold, as he kept them all moving forward.

Before they reached the branch of the sewer that would lead to Tony's offices, Tony came to a stop, head swiveling back and forth as he glanced along the paths. Just before Steve was about to pick him up by his scruff to get him _moving_ again, Tony nodded in some sort of agreement with himself and turned to Sue and Johnny. He pointed down a tunnel to their left. “Go down there. Count three tunnels on your right. Go down the fourth. Count two tunnels on your left, go down the third. Next one on your right, go up. That should put you out in Baxter, or close enough for you to get home without any trouble. Get inside, stay inside. My people will be looking after you.”

“Fourth on the right, third on the left, next right is home.” Sue repeated. “Got it.”

Johnny moved forward to grab at Tony's arm. “The kids better be safe,” he growled.

Steve watched as Tony gripped Johnny's arm right back, eyes shining with a sincerity he would have never thought the infamous Tony Stark capable of a couple months ago. Steve's stomach felt hollow as he watched the exchange of genuine human emotion. Tony was a good man, under it all. For all the good it did them. “They will be. That's a guarantee.”

Johnny waited a beat, eyes searching Tony's. Then he nodded and pulled away, heading back over to his sister. With one last look to Tony and Steve—which Steve didn't return, because he couldn't look at them now, not so soon after his great failure—they turned to the sewer on the left and hurried down it. Johnny's flickering light came on via his right hand, bobbing in the darkness until it was jut a pinprick, and then gone.

Tony turned back to Steve and tugged on his arm. Steve flinched and pulled back sharply, not wanting to be touched just now. He ignored the hurt look that passed across Tony's face, the way he seemed to shrink away in on himself.

“Come on,” Tony ordered with a nod over his shoulder. “I can get you out a block down from your apartment.”

Steve waited dully a moment, expecting Tony to tell him directions like he had Sue and Johnny. When Tony instead started walking, Steve grimaced. Oh. Tony was going to walk him to his front door, practically. With no enthusiasm Steve followed, for no other reason than he probably needed to keep himself alive. For the next few days, at least—it's what Erskine would have wanted. Steve wrapped the hand that wasn't holding his shield around his stomach and trudged forward, eyes fixed on the backs of Tony's knees. Living suddenly seemed like a terrible burden.

Steve wasn't wrong in thinking Tony was going to walk him all the way to his door. Steve stood, dripping and shivering with Tony all over the threshold to his apartment as they listened to the sounds of Sam scrambling around inside. After a half minute the door flew open and Sam was dragging them both inside, face whiter than Steve had ever seen it—which was pretty impressive, considering his dark complexion.

“Shit, Steve. Shit, shit. He's-” Sam's eyes were searching over their shoulders, and then he was ducking his head out to check down the hallway. When he came back inside and shut the door, his expression was even more grim. “So it's true? It's not just some propaganda bullshit?”

Wordlessly Steve toed off his boots and his socks. His borrowed cargos, jacket, and long-sleeved shirt came next. Not feeling enough of anything to feel something as pointless as shame, Steve's underwear joined the pile, and he padded naked across the apartment to the bed he and Sam shared. Numbly he slid under the covers, wet hair dampening the pillow the instant his head hit. He curled up facing the wall and closed his eyes. The imagine of Erskine in his last moments assaulted him: Erskine staring, Erskine looking _right at him_ , thinking he would help, mouthing something across that little distance, those few dozen steps that Steve should have just _taken_ , should have been able to traverse with those long legs and powerful lungs Erskine himself had given him.

He had left the bedroom door half-open out of a lack of care for his surroundings. He could hear Sam and Tony through the opening easily, since neither of them were bothering to be quiet. Probably thought he wasn't listening, or that he couldn't listen. Steve watched Erskine die against the back of his eyelids, obliterated in a flash of blinding light. Shows what they knew.

“Yeah,” Tony was telling Sam. “Yeah, we... they fucked us over. They changed the rules. It would have... My plan would have _worked_ , Wilson. I'm telling you, I figured it out, I knew how to... I was going to save him, for Steve. It would have worked.”

“Yeah, well: that's what they do,” Sam replied, unknowingly echoing Steve's earlier grim words to Tony. “Change the rules.”

“But it's _not_ ,” Tony whispered harshly. Against his own numbed desire, Steve's ears perked up. This was important. In the silence that was Erskine's never-heard screams, Steve listened to Tony. “You don't know them like I do. No one does. They can't just...” Silence, for a few seconds.

“I should go check on him,” Tony insisted. “He was right there, he was... I've never seen anything like it. He ripped a sentinel apart with his bare hands.”

“That's nothing. This one time, I heard he stopped an entire angry mob on his own,” Sam replied.

Another beat of silence. “I should go in there.”

“You should go home,” Sam said. “He'll be here tomorrow. And the next day. And a week from now. Whatever plans you've got, Stark: they can wait. Give the man some time to grieve.”

“I wasn't thinking about my plans,” Tony insisted. But his footsteps started away from the bedroom. “Okay. Just... Tell him...” A frustrated growl. “Never mind. I... You know I tried, right? I had a plan. I called in every favor I had. Work to the eleventh hour. I thought it was going to work—it _was_ going to work. But they changed the rules. It's not my fault.”

Sam sighed softly. Steve reached out and pressed his hand to the wall in front of him, folding it flat. He splayed his fingers and pressed, pressed hard, feeling the strength in his hands, his arm, his back. The strength Erskine gave him.

“Listen, why don't I swing by your office tomorrow,” Sam suggested. “There might be something you can do for me: something we can do for each other.”

“Of course.”

“Not with Steve,” Sam continued. He raised his voice a little. “Not unless he insists, which he better not, if he knows what's good for him.” Steve ignored the remark and squeezed his eyes shut tighter. Erskine's bruised and battered face stared back at him. His eyes were open. Wide open.

“Whatever you need,” Tony promised. “It's the least I can do.”

“You're right,” Sam agreed with him. The front door creaked open. “It _is_ the least you can do.”

The door shut. Steve listened to Sam puttering around their apartment quietly, alone. He wasn’t asleep by the time Sam finally slipped into bed next to him. He wasn't asleep by the time Sam's breaths evened out in sleep. He didn't sleep much at all, that day, as the dawn crept in over the ghetto, piercing and seeking. Steve watched the sun's advance along his wall for hours, and thought about Erskine. And the great, crushing obligation he now owed a ghost.

 


	8. Isolated System

 

Sam sat on his kitchen table as Stark worked, head scarf sitting on the table in front of him and head tilted to one side as Stark hunched over his ear. His mind was afield, testing the system as Stark painstakingly installed the new connections. In the felon's ghetto, Jennifer was meeting with a young woman, long brown hair piled on top of her head, wrapped in concentric circles. In the neighboring ghetto to Stark's, Luke Cage sat with his wife, a pretty white woman with auburn hair and a quick smile. They were cooing over their baby, feeding it some sort of gruel for breakfast complete with wooshing train noises. In his own home ghetto, Natasha was overseeing the dismantling of Erskine's empire, wrist deep in one of his secret stashes and at work on the locks. Clint stood off to the side, piercing blue eyes shining out from the dark rings that encircle them. His gaze flickered, then refocused directly on Sam's. He winked dully, lips in a tight frown. Sam moved on.

“I'm not gonna get you into New Versailles,” Stark was explaining for the hundredth time. “I'd have to invent some kind of new communication technology to get past their shields. Something utilizing quantum entanglement and a bunch of other mumbo-jumbo I'm not overly interested in dipping my toe into just yet. But... Okay, so try that. Radio should be hooked up.”

Sam frowned, reaching around in his head, and... “I'm not hearing anything,” he told Stark.

Stark hummed in displeasure while he worked. Sam brought his focus back to their apartment, looking out of his own eyes at their kitchen. “Try... Huh, okay. Before I hook up anything else, try cycling through all your bots? I think maybe I hooked it up through one of them. I shouldn't have to, but for now that might be for the best...”

Sam started rapidly cycling through his Redwing network, as fast as his mind could register the information it was steaming him. His heart jumped when he heard music, but then he realized it was just one of his bots had flown by a radio. He frowned and kept cycling through.

_There_! The visual signal on this bot was blanked, but its audio was coming through clear and strong. It was music playing, something underground and industrial. Hesitantly Sam reached out, trying to get through to another station. The music kept playing.

“I've got ears on one station,” Sam told Stark. “I can't seem to-”

“Hold that thought,” Stark grumbled. Then, _fuck_ , blinding pain shot through Sam's ear, down his neck. His hands shot out to grip at the table top, knuckles cracking.

“Stark!” He managed to grit out around the pain.

“Hang on, hang on, sorry sorry sorry- there!”

The pain ceased as suddenly as it had begun. Gingerly Sam released his grip on the tabletop finger by finger, taking deep, calming breaths. His eyes slid over to Stark—what he could see of him with his head still tilted at a ninety degree angle—and he glared roundly. “You done?”

Sam thought he saw Stark making a face out of the corner of his eye before he replied. “Sorry. I had to bypass your... Never mind the neuroscience of it. Just try and access that channel again.”

Concentrating, Sam brought up the same bot as before. It was easier now that he had a sense of which one it was. After a moment he nodded at Stark. It was playing a different song now, but it was the same station.

“Tap your finger.”

Skeptical, Sam lifted his index finger and tapped it down on his thigh. To his surprise, the station in his head changed. News from New Versailles. Quickly Sam tapped his finger again to navigate away from the station.

“It works,” he informed Stark. “How'd you do it? Reroute that bot through my motor skills cortex?”

“Sure, basically. The same way a rocket scientist's job description is making fire.” Stark's over the top sarcasm was not lost on Sam. He rolled his eyes.

“Are you done now?” he asked Stark.

A candy bar landed in Sam's lap. Peanut butter, chocolate, and nuts. It was his favorite. Scowling, Sam obediently picked up the candy bar and unwrapped it. He chewed it irritably.

Stark continued to mess around in his ear while Sam chewed. “I got you hooked up to radio. Not TV, internet, or phone lines. I'll dedicate one of your bots to each medium, then make sure you can cycle through the stations, sites, whatever.”

“So basically: one down, three to go,” Sam replied.

“Just shut up and eat your candy bar,” Stark teased. Sam found he didn't like Stark's brand of teasing as much as Steve did. It was like his mom always said: sometimes there was just no accounting for taste. He had just been under the impression that Steve actually had some—taste, that is.

Twenty minutes later, Stark flicked sharply at Sam's earlobe and stepped away from the table. Sam glowered at him from where he sat.

“All done!” Stark clapped his hands together proudly and rubbed at them. “You now have complete access to the information grid.”

Sam flipped through his bots one more time as he raised his head, tapping through the stations on the new bots Stark had hooked up.

“It all seems to be working,” he confirmed.

Stark scoffed as he tucked his tools away into the rucksack he had brought with him. “Of course it does: I made it.”

“Yeah, well: your plans don't always work out so hot, do they?”

Stark froze, his happy expression crumpling in an instant, like a sentinel beneath Steve's shield. His eyes flickered to the bedroom door, which sat shut, unmoved since Tony had come here earlier that morning.

“I... How's he...”

“Thanks for the upgrade,” Sam cut him off.

Much to Sam's surprise, Stark just nodded, eyes dropping away from the bedroom door like a kicked pup. Sam did his best to not feel bad for the guy. It wasn't too hard, considering he hadn't held him in the highest regard even before his failure to save Erskine. All that money Stark had made for himself, not worth a dime when it came down to brass tacks.

“Yeah,” Stark mumbled. He rubbed his hands together nervously. “Yeah. No problem.”

Sam slid off the table and started walking towards the front door, pushing past Stark as he did. Stark took the hint and followed. He picked up his gaudy red coat from the coat rack by the door, fumbling it in his hands for a minute before reluctantly shrugging it on. Sam stood still as Stark moved to leave the apartment, working hard to make sure Stark didn't feel welcome longer than was absolutely necessary.

“Hey.” Tony stopped just outside the doorway, hand on the door itself in a gentle attempt to keep Sam from shutting it on him. Tony nodded over Sam's shoulder, eyes kinder than Sam had ever seen them. “How's he doing?”

Sam's heart hardened. It wasn't Stark's right to ask. He didn't know Erskine. He didn't know _Steve_ , for that matter. Not like others did. Not like Sam did. Stark was just asking for his own sake, for the sake of his libido or, at best, the sake of his grand designs.

“How do you think?” Sam asked. He shut the door in Stark's face. Stark let him. 

* * *

Steve awoke that morning with the sun streaming into his bedroom, illuminating the wall that he was pressed against. He lay still for a long moment, willing his thoughts to stay silent, trying to hold onto the early-morning mindlessness of a man just waking up. He could hear Sam in the kitchen, puttering around with the oven, pans clinking, fridge opening. He was probably making himself some sort of omelet out of the powder egg and milk mixes their pantry was stocked with. It was one of his favorite meals, since they moved here. Since Erskine told them to come to this bright, dangerous place.

And there went the early-morning calm, shattered like glass jugs of fresh milk stolen from New Versailles' storerooms. Steve rolled over onto his back, then pushed himself up. He sat with the blanket low on his hips, staring unseeing out at the far wall of the bedroom. It sounded like a nice day outside: the thrum of people's conversations on the street, the woosh of the train at the station a few blocks down. Life was still rushing on around him. Without him.

Resolutely Steve lifted himself out of bed and got dressed. It had been a week. That was all the time he was going to allow himself: seven days to grieve, seven days to go on runs and come back to the house and eat and sleep and do nothing while people struggled and starved and died around him. Erskine wouldn't have wanted him to take even a day—had only let him take time after Bucky died because he was injured and unable to work. Erskine would have chastised him for wasting the gifts he had been given on his own self-pity. Erskine hadn't made him big and strong and healthy so that he could lie in bed and stare at a wall. He hadn't implanted a shield of light in his palms so that Steve could hide behind it from the rest of the world. The shield was meant to protect others. _Steve_ was meant to protect others.

When Steve stepped out of their bedroom and into the rest of the apartment, Sam was seated at the kitchen table, plowing through his breakfast. He looked up when Steve entered, fork suspended in hair halfway to his mouth.

“Morning,” Steve forced out. His throat felt scratchy from disuse.

“Morning,” Sam replied cautiously. “You, uh... Want some breakfast? I can make more.”

Steve shook his head, going for a glass and filling it with tap water. He downed that in a few long gulps, then rummaged through the cupboards for a protein bar he could take with him.

“I'm heading out,” he told Sam. He didn't look Sam's way, worried about what he might see in his expression. Instead Steve grabbed his blue coat—the one Tony had given him—and shoved the protein bar into his pocket. He tugged on his red leather gloves and blue cap, and headed out of the apartment without a second glance back.

On the way through the busy streets Steve ate his protein bar, though his stomach still felt hollow after he finished it. His appetite was back, apparently, which was for the best. The guilt and shame at not being able to save Erskine still curled, rotten and festering, in his stomach, but it would seem that over the past week he had starved his body enough that even that guilt wasn't enough to suppress his hunger. When he passed by a stand selling meats cooked in hot oil and covered in some savory-smelling spices, Steve's stomach growled loudly enough that he stepped off the street and to the side, looking over the shop's wares. Absently he fingered some coins in his pocket, mentally estimating how much he had to spend. Tony had been paying him for his and Sam's services—more than was even remotely rational, Steve knew—but a secure income didn't erase a lifetime of being frugal.

“You want something or you just looking?” the vendor asked.

Steve glanced up from where he was looking, smiling pleasantly at the pale man with dark hair who was scowling at him. “Sorry. Can I have the chicken please? With that... curry sauce? Is that how you say it?”

The man's expression suddenly changed. Where before it had been impatient and impersonal, in the time it took for Steve to finish speaking it lit up, becoming familiar and joyful. “Of course! Of course! Yes, 'curry'. Very good. One moment, here, here.”

Steve fumbled in his pockets for the change, finger slipping under the force of the man's enthusiasm. He took the stick of chicken from the man awkwardly, passing off the change with his non-dominant hand at the same time.

But the vendor was shaking his head, pushing Steve's hand back to him. “No, no! Free, for you. Your money's no good here.”

Steve hesitated, hand still held out at the vendor even though he kept pushing it away. A little furrow appeared between his eyebrows. “But...” Steve tried again.

“No! Please. I insist. A gift.”

Steve's fingers clenched around the coin in his hand. He couldn't turn down free food, but the way the vendor was looking at him... almost like hero-worship. It made Steve uncomfortable.

“Thank you,” Steve replied, finally giving in. He tucked his coins back into his coat pocket and nodded at the vendor. “Have a good day.”

“The same to you!” the vendor called after him as Steve started down the street. When Steve glanced over his shoulder a half-block down, he saw the vendor talking rapidly to a woman from the storefront behind the cart. He was gesturing at the TV she had sitting in the window, and she was gesturing back out at Steve, hand jabbing towards him like she was emphasizing some point. Steve frowned and turned away, biting into his chicken. He moaned involuntarily, surprised by the spicy, savory flavor of this curry seasoning. At least his food was good, even if the vendor himself was strange. Steve put the man out of his mind as he continued his walk.

In short order his feet led him to where he knew he'd end up eventually: Tony's office and home. Steve stood across the street from the building, squinting up at its roof. Tony was up there: his red coat stood out bright against the grime of the city. He was bent over something, facing away from the street and Steve. For a minute or two Steve just watched him, absorbed in his work, rushing to and fro as he stumbled over himself in his enthusiasm for whatever this project was.

The door to Tony's office opened, drawing Steve's attention away from where Tony was darting around the roof. Miss Potts was there, coming out to the railing so she could peer down at Steve.

“Mr. Rogers,” she greeted him cooly. “Would you like to come up?”

Squinting up at her in the morning light, Steve nodded. “Sure thing,” he called up to her.

As he ascended the stairs Miss Potts informed him: “Tony's been expecting you.”

“How's that?” Steve a asked incredulously. “I didn't even know I was coming here myself.”

Miss Potts held the door open for Steve, and then followed him inside when he went. “Tony has a way of knowing people better than they know themselves.”

Steve glanced up the stairwell that he knew led to the roof. He lowered his gaze back to Miss Potts after a moment and raised an eyebrow. “Would Tony be able to apply that same perceptiveness to himself?” he wondered.

Miss Potts' expression turned cool in an instant—where before she had been professional and distant, now she was showing open disapproval for Steve. She had that disturbing look mothers had: the one that made you feel about two inches tall and laid all your ill-intentions bare. Steve swallowed thickly.

“Anyone who knows Tony knows he's not in the business of lying to himself. There's far too much at stake for him to waste time with self-deceit.”

Hoping to salvage some of his working relationship with Miss Potts, Steve replied: “Then that's something we've got in common.”

Miss Potts' reply was a pink pair of pursed lips. She gestured with one hand up at the stairs. “If that's all, Mr. Rogers.”

Steve nodded. “Right. Yes. Thank you. Miss Potts.” Steve ascended the stairs quickly after that, happier to seek out more welcoming company on the roof.

Tony's hand whipped out in Steve's direction the minute he stepped foot outside, gilded-gold sleeve cuffs glinting out grandly at the edges of his red coat. Steve settled his back against the stairwell, looking over the mess Tony had made of his roof.

There were great piles of thin boards stacked everywhere—except they weren't _boards_ , not ones made of wood at least. Steve craned his neck to look at a stack near his feet, uncertain if he was allowed to touch and figuring discretion was the smarter route when Tony was at work. The boards were made out of some material Steve had never seen before—not wood, metal, or glass. Not even plastic, though that might have been closer to the mark.

“Carbon fiber!” Tony announced as he swept over to Steve. Reaching down, he carelessly snatched up one of the sheets from the pile nearest to Steve, upsetting the whole thing. Not so delicate, then.

Tony shoved the sheet in Steve's hand, then encouraged him to bend it back and forth by gesticulating. “Go on! Stuff's stronger than sentinels. Stuff might even be stronger than _you_ , though I'm not about to take that bet anytime soon.”

Steve winced, and saw Tony do so, too. Not the most tactful way to bring up the events of that morning.

“They're solar panels,” Tony finished lamely, taking the carbon fiber sheet from Steve's hand.

“Sam show you his upgrades?” Tony asked, changing the subject.

Steve nodded, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. “Yeah. They're great. Handy as heck. With his eyes in every communication out there, it'll be pretty hard for New Versailles to get a jump on us. Once they step foot outside their walls, we've got eyes on them and anything they say.”

Tony's mouth twisted speculatively, eyes glinting as he glanced back over his shoulder at Steve. “Yeah. Real handy for 'gathering' information.”

Steve didn't miss the way Tony's voice lilted over the word “gathering”—like Steve was missing out big if he thought _that's_ what Sam's upgrades were for. But then Tony was rushing on, gesturing at the mess his roof had turned into.

“This is my latest project,” he explained. “Solar panels, to power whatever building they sit on top of. The secret is the material I'm making it out of. I can pack these carbon fiber sheets with an exponentially larger amount of photovoltaic modules than any other material out there.”

“That's good,” Steve replied, not managing to muster up the enthusiasm to equal Tony's just yet. Tony seemed to sense this and quieted himself, shoving his hands in his jeans pockets as he shuffled his way over to the edge of his building. Steve followed him, gingerly picking his way between the precarious miniature skyscrapers of solar panels, winding his way down the artificial streets they made to Tony.

“It's the most important problem I could be working on: energy. The problem with everything is energy,” Tony explained. His palm came up to rub at his chest. “Commodities, production, labor—that's small potatoes. If you want to get to the root of the problem, the ontologically prior system, it's energy. New Versailles has it, we don't.”

Tony stared out over the rooftops, a disinherited king overseeing his kingdom. “You ever learn about the heat death of the universe?” he asked.

Steve shook his head. “Sounds like a school thing,” he reasoned. “And we didn't get much of that, where I come from.”

Tony glanced back at him, mouth slashing down uncomfortably. “No,” he agreed. “You don't.”

Turning back to look out over his ghetto, Tony explained: “There's these things, called the laws of thermodynamics. Physics rules. This particular rule goes, for the layman: 'energy cannot be created or destroyed.'”

Steve nodded. “I think I've actually heard that before. But not as physics rules, more like... philosophy.”

“There are worse words to live by,” Tony conceded. “But in physics it's definitive. There's no wishy-washy-ness to it; no room for interpretation. Energy _cannot_ be created or destroyed. Whatever energy the universe started with, that's what we've got to work with.”

Steve frowned. “But if energy can't be destroyed, then it's okay, right? We can't make more of it, but we can't use it up, either. Unless there's something that requires more than all the energy in the universe all at once, we're fine.”

Tony turned back to Steve and stepped away from the ledge, striding over to him. “You know, you're too smart to be hanging around the likes of me,” he pointed out.

A smile tugged at the corners of Steve's lips—the first in a week. He shrugged. “'Smart' never meant 'good judgement'. You of all people should know that.”

Tony laughed. “Yeah, well: maybe.” Reaching out, Tony grabbed at Steve's hand. After an initial flutter of flies in his stomach, Steve allowed himself to be dragged over to the ledge and settle down next to Tony. He dropped Steve's hand once they were seated, which left Steve feeling strangely bereft. Or maybe not-so-strangely. He'd have to be a lot better at denial than he was to not know where things were heading with Tony, if he reached out and took it. After. After their work was done, there'd be time for that.

“The problem is,” Tony continued explaining, “energy can't be used up, sure. But it can be used out. Made useless. 'Entropy' is the technical term for it: heat energy. Every time you use energy, even for the smallest thing—getting a motor to spin, say—a little bit of the energy you used turned into heat, through friction or something else. And heat energy is useless.”

“But heated homes are... good. You have to heat food to cook it, heat houses to stay warm in the winter, heat water to make it clean. That doesn't seem like useless energy.”

Steve shifted uncomfortably, certain he had just said something stupid. But Tony grinned like a teacher doting on his favorite pupil.

“But once you boil water, heat a house or food, where does that heat go?”

Steve waved a hand vaguely upwards. “I'd never thought about it, but: up? Into the atmosphere? Water goes up when it vaporizes, forms clouds, but it comes back down as rain. It's not lost forever.”

“Heat is. Heat isn't trapped by the atmosphere the way water is. It escapes, goes out into space as energy waves. Useless energy waves. Think of energy like... a coat. You can wear it until there's holes in it, at which point maybe you rip off the sleeves, tear out the lining, make some repairs until it's a shirt. Then you wear that one out, patch it up with itself, until it's only good for an undershirt. Then a rag. Then eventually, you're left with this useless scrap of material, not even good for soaking up stains on your workstation floor.” Tony's nose wrinkled slightly. “Not the best analogy, but I'm a scientist, not a writer.”

“It's good enough, because I get it,” Steve reassured him. “You can change energy into different kinds of energy, but eventually it just bottoms out in this junk energy.”

Tony grinned. “Exactly. Everything's heading to that, one day. Because the universe is what we call an 'isolated system'. Unless you figure a way out of the system, out of the universe, you're stuck with the second law. Which means everything will end. One day.”

“Heat death,” Steve finished for him.

“Heat death,” Tony confirmed.

They fell silent for a long moment, Tony staring out at the streets below their dangling feet, Steve staring at Tony. After a minute or two, Tony spoke again.

“You see this?” Tony tapped at his chest, at the glowing network of blue streets that led to the dark glowing orb in the center. Steve nodded, chancing a glance down that he rarely allowed himself.

Tony's fingers splayed out and covered the center of the network, the slightly darker circle in the center of his chest, no bigger than a grape. He stared out over the city, throat working like he wanted to speak but hadn't yet screwed up the courage, or thought of the words. It was so contrary to what Steve was used to from him that he was suddenly very willing to listen, to patiently wait for whatever it was Tony was trying to say.

After a moment more of worrying silence from Tony, Steve prompted: “You said it was for your heart.”

“Clockwork heart,” Tony mumbled. A quick grin flashed at the corners of his mouth as he glanced over at Steve. “Thought it seemed like an appropriate mythos, you know?”

“I suppose I should have guessed: everything about you is constructed to support your legend, rather than reveal the truth of the man behind it.” Steve didn't mean his observation to be quite so cutting—not when Tony was showing some vulnerability for once—but there it was. Maybe Steve's sharpness could be excused by the hurt that still sat too raw on his heart.

Tony, for his part, just took Steve's comment the way it had been intended and shrugged in agreement. His hand still lay pressed to his chest, covering the little dense circle of light.

“It's a quantum computer,” Tony whispered, so soft Steve had to lean forward to hear it.

Although it was obvious Tony had just said something significant, something earth-shattering, Steve was unfortunately still relatively illiterate in advanced technologies. So he had to ask: “What's that?”

Tony's smile was bitter as he glanced over at Steve, head tilting lazily towards him. “It's why I was kicked out of New Versailles.”

Steve's eyes widened. His gaze flickered down to Tony's chest, then back into his eyes. “What?”

Letting his hand finally drop, Tony looked away from Steve and out over the city. “I was a technological genius growing up—even by New Versailles' standards. By the time I was a teenager, I had absorbed everything there was to learn about technology and science, and started to embark out on my own, setting out to create something _new_. Quantum physics had captured my imagination at the time: Schrödinger’s cat, the double-slit experiment, Heisenberg's paradox of velocity or position.” Those words meant next to nothing to Steve, but he understood what they were in context: mysteries for Tony to turn his big brain to. Tony continued: “I decided there was something to be found, there. Something to be figured out. So I started working at it. Tinkering. Figured out how to build one of these maybe a week before they kicked me out.”

That was too much information to process just that moment. Steve leaned towards Tony, trying desperately to reconcile what Tony was telling him with all the rumors and gossip he had heard. “What's a quantum computer?” Steve asked. “And why would they kick you out? For working on one?” _Or was it some unrelated transgression_?

Tony seemed to understand exactly what Steve had heard about him before this, because he was smiling some sad little smile, like he was sorry to be thought so ill of, and yet none-too-pleased to be spoiling the mental portrait Steve had built up of him.

“A quantum computer is a computer so small it's made with individual atoms—dozens of them, rather than the millions of trillions that a normal computer might have.”

Steve frowned. “But you wouldn't even be able to see it. What good would it be?”

Tony smiled wryly at Steve for a long moment, then stared back out at the city. Tony's hands braced on either side of his thighs, shoulders hunched in melancholy. Steve's fingers twitched with the desire to reach out and comfort, but he held them steady on his knees.

“I was going to help everybody,” Tony whispered. “I could have... I could have saved _everyone_.”

Steve's eyes widened as he listened, rapt.

“Quantum computers solve the solid state device density problem. With computers, after a certain point you can't cram any more _stuff_ into the space without the circuit just flat-out melting on you, or your yield failing to increase in any discernible way. It's this hard-line limit on computing power, like a vertical asymptote on a graph. You can't break through it any conventional way: you have to figure out something completely different, cut the Gordian knot and jump over the limit.” Tony's mouth twisted. “Sorry for mixing metaphors.”

“So you figured out a way to solve the... the density problem,” Steve confirmed. He frowned. “But how does that help anyway? It's computers. It's not food.”

“Don't forget what the _Fates_ said,” Tony reminded Steve, a hint of a despondent sneer in his voice.

“Data is king,” Steve replied.

“Data is king,” Tony repeated back. He nodded forlornly, looking out at the city. “If I could figure out a solution to the SSD density problem, I could solve _all_ density limitations. Solar panels could be capturing energy on the _quantum_ level. With one panel, a _single_ panel, I could capture enough energy every day to fuel... _everything_. Lights, phones, television, computers: all of it would run for free. For everyone.” Tony threw out a hand carelessly at his solar panels. “This is like making Michelangelo sculpt with a handful of used chewing gum after creating the David. With his feet.”

Steve gasped, feeling like a hole was being punched through his heart. “Free energy for everyone-”

“Free energy for every _thing_ ,” Tony pointed out. He was getting agitated now: hands clenching and unclenching around the ledge of the building, body rocking dangerously back and forth. “Don't forget everything that needs electricity to produce goods. Farms, refineries, factories: if energy was free-”

“The cost of production would be negligible,” Steve breathed. “God, _Tony_.”

“That's why they kicked me out,” Tony growled. “In the naivete of my youth, I thought I had discovered something _good_. Something they had all been searching for, just no one had been able to figure out.” Tony brought his hands up off the roof, staring down into his open palms. Steve noted that they were scraped and red with the uneven, gritty surface of the rooftop. He wanted to reach out, wrap his hands around them, pull them into his chest and stop Tony from ever hurting himself again, but he suppressed the instinct. Tony wouldn't welcome the comfort, he knew. And even if he did... now wasn't the time for it. “I was wrong. All they ever wanted was to keep you down. They weren't trying to engineer better solutions, trying to fix the problem. They were trying to maintain the status quo, or at the very most make things better for _themselves_ , and no one else.”

“But you still managed to make it,” Steve pointed out. His hand reached out for the blue circle in the center of Tony's chest, before he pulled it back to his own chest, apologetic for the intrusive gesture.

“I managed to make one,” Tony agreed. “And _just_ one, before they kicked me out. This one.” Tony's hand came up to touch at his chest just once before it dropped back down to his lap. “When my theories and blueprints were met with less enthusiasm than I had been expecting when I presented them to the Board, I knew something was up. So I started to build myself one quantum computer—just one. I made it to save my life.”

Tony's head tilted to Steve, an odd gleam in his eye. “Literally. Save it. Like a computer file.”

Steve shook his head, not comprehending. “What?”

And then Tony did something Steve hadn't been expecting: he tugged down his shirt with one hand, then reached forward with his other and grabbed Steve's hand, pressing it to his chest right overtop the... the “quantum computer”. The hard drive?

“This has me on it,” Tony explained, looking straight into Steve's eyes. “All of me. It contains a blueprint of my DNA, and it scans my brain daily to update. I...” Tony hesitated, uncertainty shinning in his eyes for the first time. “I don't know if it works. I know the data's there. But I don't know if scanning my brain would preserve my memories. Mind-body problem and all that. It might be good for nothing. It might not be able to bring me back, really _me_. But it was the best I could do.”

“You...” Steve stared confusedly at Tony. His hand clenched reflexively over Tony's bare chest, searching for the extra heat under his fingers from the circuitry glowing cooly beneath Tony's skin. There wasn't any: just the average heat from Tony's skin, warming Steve's fingers. Tony shivered softly beneath his touch. “You have a back-up? A... A saved copy of yourself? On here?”

Tony's smile was watery. “I was a kid, and I was scared. I didn't know what the Board was going to do to me. All I knew was that my mind and my mind alone had the secret to quantum computers—a secret which could change the world. A secret which, coincidentally, I could use to make sure there would always be someone who knew how to build it—or at the very least, _could_ _learn_ how to build it, if my memories don't back up.” Tony grimaced. “I hope they do. But I just can't know for sure. Reproducing a physical brain-state might not be enough to reproduce the memories that brain contains. We just don't know enough about how the brain-mind connection works... and I'm an engineer, not a neuroscientist.” He rolled his eyes, a small smile peaking at the corner of his lips. “Or a philosopher.”

Steve's fingers stroked gently at the skin beneath them, at the amazing, genius, brilliant network of quantum data streams under his fingertips. “I don't think I understood half of what you just said, but I got the gist of it,” Steve murmured.

Tony laughed. With a twinkle in his eye, he tugged on Steve's hand, bringing it up to his lips so he could press a kiss to the knuckles. Steve flushed hotly and drew his hand back. Tony didn't seem offended by the reaction, just smiling and smiling at Steve as he cradled his hand to his chest, thumb stroking across his fingers worryingly.

“But if you figured out how to do it once, you could do it again, couldn't you?” Steve asked. “If you can make a computer out of atoms, just a dozen atoms, can't you make the solar panel, like you said? Why are you wasting time with these... carbon fiber?... solar panels? Can't you build us something to give us energy _forever_?”

Tony's face fell at that, any trace of easy happiness gone from it now. He shook his head, eyes dark. “When I got thrown out—when I _ran_ , because I didn't know what they were going to do to me once they decided I was a threat, _still_ don't know what they were going to do with me—I ran with nothing but the QC in my chest and the brain in my skull. The kind of tech I needed to build even this little prototype, it's....” Tony shook his head, sighing wistfully, “It's light-years ahead of anything I could get my hands on out here. The _energy_ needed _alone_ , to build even one more of these things... it's more than I could ever get my hands on, if I spent a hundred years out here scrimping and saving.”

Steve considered this all carefully, mind sifting through the unfamiliar information as best he could. “Couldn't you modify the one inside you, somehow? To give you the energy you need?”

Tony choked out a laugh that sounded more like a worried whimper. “I, uh. No. Definitely not. Steve, this thing is so integrated to my body at this point that I'm pretty sure it's keeping me alive.” Abruptly the glowing blue lines under Tony's skin took on a whole new meaning in Steve's eyes, the warm, calming light suddenly looking sickly and disturbed. Steve swallowed down bile, gut churning nauseatingly at the revelation. And to think Steve had thought Tony _vain_ for his modifications, the first time they met. “Besides, it still probably wouldn't be enough raw energy, not to mention all the tools I would have to fabricate from scratch—pretty much impossible, even for a guy like me.”

“This is why you need to get back into New Versailles,” Steve stated, not a question.

Tony nodded, big eyes looking steadily into his, hungry with hope. God, some days Steve wished he didn't inspire quite so much hope in people. It was terrifying, to see all that hope there just because of you. Especially to see all that hope inside Tony, because of him. Tony seemed like a man who had given up on hope a long time ago, as a form of self-defense. And then in came Steve, a naïve kid, thinking he could just... what? Gather up some supplies, some people, a roughshod plan, and everything would work out?

Yet, and yet: here was Tony, looking at him like it was _possible_ . Like he really believed Steve might be able to _do it_ , to succeed where he had failed for so many years.

Steve wiped his hands through his flopping blond hair, fingers shaking. God, Tony. _Don't_ . _Don't believe in me_.

Tony's eyes dropped away from Steve's after a second, shoulders hunching a little awkwardly. He was older than Steve, but times like this the difference in their ages didn't seem to be very much. Knowing what he knew now, Steve thought that maybe it was because of Tony's upbringing in New Versailles. He was raised a pampered child into his twenties, and only was faced with the harsh realities of life outside their safe, exclusionary walls after that. That sort of upbringing had probably stunted his emotional growth, after a fashion.

“Hey, listen: I know I'm not always the most tactful guy,” Tony started, echoing Steve's own thoughts, “but I'm sorry about Erskine. I know it's not the same, but... when I was leaving New Versailles, making my QC and implanting it: there was this guy. Yinsen. He was one of my old science professors, back in the day. Never really jived with the rest of the people in New Versailles, but when I was his student I didn't really know what was the deal. Turns out he was, uh... he was a slave.”

Steve blinked, confused for a second before outrage took over. “He was a _what_?”

Tony wiped his hands against his jeans. “Yeah. So, it's rare, but you know the black-bag executions that take place inside New Versailles? They're not... always... _executions_ , exactly.”

A faint heartbeat of hope flared up in Steve's chest before he stomped it out. Bucky was _dead_ . They had taken his _body_ inside, not captured him. Still... “Why? What do they need slaves for? They have _us_.”

“You know all the laws about prosthetics, right?” Tony asked. “Well have you ever wondered _why_ those laws are in place? Why _prosthetics_ , of all things, are illegal?”

“It's so we don't get too advanced,” Steve replied. He thought it was obvious. “So we don't succeed technologically to the point where New Versailles is threatened, either because we don't need them any more for supply rations or because we grow powerful enough to overthrow them.”

“That's only one side of it,” Tony corrected him. “The other side is where they take the people they black-bag. People like Yinsen. Not everyone born in New Versailles is a super-genius like me.”

Steve knocked his shoulder into Tony's. “So modest.”

Tony grinned, big and bold, over at Steve. “You'll keep me that way.”

Steve flushed and ducked his head. “Okay. So not everyone is a genius. But you're still all light-years ahead of us, with your eduction and medical services. Kids who have three squares a day are gonna do better coming up with new inventions than ones who haven't seen a vegetable in a year.”

Tony nodded. “That's not wrong. But sometimes you need even more. New Versailles, their tech is parsecs ahead of out here, sure. But you still need to advance, come up with new tech, and be able to fix the old stuff when it breaks down. You have to keep the people _just_ happy enough that they don't revolt. Which means you need people intelligent enough to run hundreds of different ghettos, figure out the supply lines, have ways of monitoring dissenting chatter. That's why, if someone _exceptional_ got onto New Versailles' radar, they'd take him or her in.”

Tony fell silent for a moment, looking down at his hands. He rubbed them together against the slight chill that was already burning off the early-morning air. “Yinsen was one of those exceptional people.”

He turned to Steve. “I didn't know. Not until I was stumbling onto my QC that ended up getting me kicked out. I thought he was just... he was just my physics professor. Engineering. I didn't know he was a prisoner. That he was a _slave_ inside New Versailles.”

Tony rubbed the back of his head fitfully. “I didn't even believe him when I first found out. Because I couldn't imagine why a guy his age would even want to be outside New Versailles. Me, sure: I entertained some adolescent fantasies of escaping, running around outside the walls, seeing what there was to see. I couldn't understand what a middle-aged guy would want outside.”

“To see his family!” Steve cut in, shocked. “To rejoin his friends, to pick up his life from whatever point you had taken him out of it!”

Tony winced. “Yeah, okay, no need to belabor the point. I was a spoiled little shit. Figured that out around my first night on the run outside the walls.”

Steve's heart twinged at the thought of a young, twenty-something Tony Stark, scared and alone and probably cold and starving, his first night out of his decadent home.

“Yinsen was the only one who helped me, when I figured I couldn't stick around any more.”

“But what about your parents? Your friends?” Steve asked. “It isn't that different inside the walls, is it? People still have mothers and fathers, right?”

“Sure,” Tony nodded, shrugging his shoulder. He scraped his palms nervously against the dirty surface of the roof. “But Mom and Dad died when I was a teen. Lab accident.” Before Steve could offer his sympathies, Tony was rushing on: “Even before they died, Dad was pretty distant. Obie, his best friend, was more of a father figure to me than the old man ever was. That just became more true after his death. Yinsen was another of those father figures. I was a geeky kid, into science and with eyes bigger than my stomach. But where Obie was watching me carefully, waiting for... _something_... Yinsen was just happy to encourage me, help me grow. And when I started to crack the secrets of quantum computation, Yinsen was the one who warned me that my life was at risk.”

“But if you were such a genius, why would they want to eliminate you?” Steve interrupted. “If New Versailles is desperate for genius to the point that they'll kidnap people like Yinsen, why drive you away or try and kill you? Why not just imprison you, like they did Yinsen? Keep you under lock and key—keep you in their sights.”

“They might have,” Tony conceded. “But I couldn't know for certain what they wanted from me, what they were going to do with me. Yinsen told me to run, so that's what I did: I ran. From Obie, from the council, from everyone. Yinsen...” Tony stopped, looked away. Hesitantly Steve reached out a hand and folded it over Tony's. Tony welcomed the touch, hand clenching tightly around Steve's. “Yinsen hung back. Let me get out. He... He didn't...” Gently Steve rubbed his thumb along the back of Tony's hand. It seemed to help.

“It was Obie,” Tony suddenly growled. He turned to face Steve, eyes blazing. “It was _Obie_ who came after me, who lead the charge. His men killed Yinsen. His men were going to kill me, or at best, imprison me. All because I was trying to _help_ , trying to change things from a zero sum game into a scenario where _everybody_ won. I could give people food, heat, electricity, _everything_ , for _everybody_ , without taking a _single. resource_. from New Versailles. They wouldn't have to do without a single luxury—their lot would even be improved! Everyone would benefit! No one would be harmed! No one would have to do with less!”

“But they don't want that,” Steve pointed out. “They don't just want what they have: they need to be more than everyone else.”

“Yeah, well: apparently,” Tony grumbled. Gently he knocked their joined hands against his thigh, eyes distant as he thought. Finally he shook his head and released Steve's hand, smiling absently. “And there you have it. I've been out here for the past couple decades, building myself a reputation as well as I can. Using that genius brain of mine to make life as much better for people as I can, knowing I had the invention to fix it all already in my grasp before I got myself expelled from paradise. Now it's just a matter of fighting my way back inside, or building myself up enough to _buy_ the damn technology from them—though I expect the it'll be the former long before the latter.”

“If you've got this all figured out, why do you even need me?” Steve asked. “And don't try to deny it. I may not be a super-genius when it comes to carbon fiber solar panels or quantum computers, but I'm not stupid, either. You're doing the same thing New Versailles did with the people they black-bagged: you're collecting exceptional people to yourself. Johnny and Sue Storm, Jennifer Walters, Pepper, Rhodey, Happy. Luke Cage and Jessica and Danny Rand. Even the three Fates are on your payroll: if not under your thumb, at least not against you. And now, me and Sam. But me especially. You want _me_ here, but I don't know why. I'm just some kid with a shield, with too big a heart and mouth to match what I can do, half the time.”

“I need to inspire people to my cause,” Tony explained.

“Then why don't _you_ do that?”

“Because I'm still angry about Yinsen,” Tony growled. “Because I want to rip every smug son-of-a-bitch's head right off his shoulders and play handball with it against their beautiful, soaring walls. Because I want to do things to Obie that I can't speak aloud, they're so fucked-up and depraved. Because I'm not a _good guy_ , Steve. Because I was raised in that place, or maybe just because of something rotten in me from the day I was born, I'm just not good. Not like you.”

Steve gasped softly in the wake of Tony's self-loathing. Reaching out, he touched his gloved fingertips to the crook of Tony's elbow. “I get angry,” Steve countered. His hand wrapped further around Tony's arm, tugging him in. “You know I get angry. You've _seen_ it.”

“Yeah, well.” Tony snorted and glanced sidelong at Steve. “I'm aware you've got flaws. I don't think you're the messiah. You're human. But you're better than that, too. You're all... hope, and love, and optimism. You see the _best_ in everyone. And I don't mean their utility: that's what I see. I look at Jennifer and I see a woman who has connections in the felon's ghetto, who has the physical strength to protect herself and my people, and who has a better working knowledge of the legal system this side of the walls. That's her utility to me. _You_ look at her, and... what? What did you see?”

Steve shrugged. “She's a woman who cares about the people in her charge—and that's how she thinks about the ghetto: her charge. They're her people, she's responsible for them. Every case she loses, even the hopeless ones, shames her. But she keeps fighting because that's who she is: a fighter. She's going to fight for every person in there, because they're _hers_.”

“The only way I can do this is with you,” Tony blurted out. Steve's breath caught in his throat.

“I'm not...” Steve swallowed hard. “I'm not perfect. I'm no saint.”

“I sure hope not,” Tony replied with a grin. His opposite hand came up to squeeze at Steve's hand wrapped around his elbow. “Nobody is allowed to be this good-looking _and_ good.”

Steve flushed and tugged his hand away quickly, rubbing it on his pants. Tony just grinned at him, easy and proud of his ability to make Steve blush.

“You inspire people. You draw people to you. People follow you.”

“People don't love me,” Tony explained matter-of-factly. “I've known that since I was about nine years old. People would listen to me, yeah. They'd _respect_ me, because they knew I was competent, because they knew I was smart. And that was okay: I can work with that. But I knew, before I was out of grade school, that people would never love me. They'd never follow me.”

“I-” Steve cut himself off, the words he had been about to foolishly declare sticking in his throat with one sharp, desperate look from Tony. “I'd follow you,” he corrected himself. “I _do_ follow you.”

“Working for me isn't exactly the same thing,” Tony countered with a wry grin.

Steve wanted to point out that that wasn't what he'd meant, but one look at Tony and Steve realized he knew. So he shut his mouth for a second, and when he opened it, said instead: “The first day that we met, you invited me to dinner and asked me what my grand designs were. They haven't changed.”

“You want education, food, shelter, and medicine for everybody.” Tony ticked off the points on his fingers. “I remember. And I kept you around because I can get those things to everybody—but only with your help.”

“ _How_ , though?” Steve asked, frustrated. “What can I contribute that you can't? People like me: big deal. I'm just a guy with a shield and some sound common sense—but not nearly enough to keep my head down, obviously.”

“Ask me what my endgame is,” Tony prompted.

Steve frowned. “But you already told me.”

Tony rolled his eyes and kicked Steve's foot with his, dangling over the side of his building. “Yeah, and I gave you the press answer. Ask me again now that you've known me for more than fifteen minutes.”

Steve rolled his eyes and kicked gently back at Tony's foot, their heavy work boots thudding dully against each other. “Tony Stark: what exactly is your endgame?”

“Why thank you Steve Rogers I thought you'd never ask,” Tony teased, fluttering his eyelashes. Steve laughed and nudged at him, devouring the little aggressive moments of contact hungrily. It was all he was going to get, or allow himself, until all this mess was over.

Tony, for all his joking around, fell quiet for a few long seconds as he contemplated his answer. “It's all wrapped up in you, you know. You were always my missing piece. I mean, I could start a revolution pretty easily. Start a riot, spread the word, let it get _big_ . It wouldn't be successful, but hell, it might be. Maybe I could even bring New Versailles' walls down, with enough Stark-brand weapons supplied to the right people, with those right people angry enough. But then they're a mob, and I can't control a mob. A mob might bring down the walls of New Versailles—crazier things have happened in history, I'm sure of it—but that same mob would end up trashing the labs and generators I need to create a new QC. I can unleash all that power, maybe, maybe not, who knows, but I _know_ I can't control it, can't reign it in.

“I don't need a mob, or a riot,” Tony continued. “I don't even need a revolution. I need a _war_. I need something organized. Controlled. It's the only way I can bring down New Versailles _and_ build the technology that would improve everyone's lives. That's why I need you.”

The enormity of what Tony expected of him came crashing down on Steve. He thought back to the riot he had managed to quell over in the felons' ghetto, the size of it, the force of the people that had nearly buckled Steve's legs and sent him running. And Steve thought about how _small_ that was, in the greater picture of things. How very, very large a war that could achieve the results Tony wanted against New Versailles would have to be.

“I can't make that happen. I don't know how to lead a war.”

“But you know how to talk to people. You understand them, you love them. And they love you right back for it.”

“You think just because I managed to pick some kids out of a crowd and talk to them I've got this superpower at controlling mob mentality. That's just the problem, Tony: it's _mob_ mentality. What they love today they may hate tomorrow. Today's hero is tomorrow's villain. What worked on them once might never again. It's an isolated incident-”

“Or just the beginning of a pattern,” Tony interrupted.

The look Tony was giving him... Steve was reminded of that odd vendor in the street this morning, excited and hopeful, hero-worshipping. Tony wasn't as bad, nor as obvious. But there was a glimmer there, in his eyes. Some core emotion that was the same, shared between Tony and the nice man selling his curry chicken.

Luckily, Steve's stomach growled just then, reminding him that his appetite was back and raging. Tony grinned and the tension that had begun to build round them fell away. Hopping to his feet, Tony reached a hand down to Steve, who took it gladly. Anything to ease back into the cautious friendship that had grown between the two of them, and away from these heavy discussions of revolution and war. Discussions best left to more stoic, stronger, steadier men than Steve.

“I guess that's my cue to offer you lunch?” Tony asked with a grin.

“It can't be even ten,” Steve pointed out.

Tony checked his watch and frowned down at it for a second before brightening. “Second breakfast?”

Steve shrugged slyly. “Normally I'd chastise you for the indulgence, but since my stomach seems to agree with you on this one...”

Tony laughed and punched Steve in the shoulder before slinging his arm around them and leading Steve to the stairs. “Yeah yeah, defender of the poor and prudent. Check it, you'll love this one: ever heard of a thing called 'brunch'?”

Steve frowned. “Does it mean 'A lot of hair brushes'?”

“Too clever by half,” Tony growled, squeezing Steve's shoulder playfully. Steve's side was warm where it was pushed against Tony's. “No. It means 'a meal between breakfast and lunch'.”

“Please tell me that's _instead of_ both meals rather than _in addition to_ the three squares a day you New Versailles denizens eat.”

“In addition. And I haven't even told you about afternoon tea yet...”

 


	9. Panic Station

 

Big brown eyes stared into Steve's, holding his gaze as surely as if his eyes had been glued in place. Slowly, the eyes blinked, long, thick lashes closing over chubby cheeks and little circles under the eyes before they swept open again.

“Baaaahh.”

Steve grinned, waggling the spoon in his hand. “That's right. 'Banana.' Yuuuum.”

“Bbbbrrrr.” Dani blew a raspberry, then giggled with joy at the sound she had managed to make. She smacked her hands down on table gleefully while Steve moved the spoon around, trying to catch her attention.

“Open up...” Steve wheedled. His mouth opened wide as he attempted to get her to copy him. “Yum yum! Open...”

Dani's mouth fell open and Steve deftly guided the mushed-up banana filled spoon into her mouth, scraping the top of it off on her top lip as he pulled it out. She swallowed most of it, to Steve's great delight. He cleaned up the rest of it with the spoon for a second go. “Good job!” Steve cooed. “You're a good eater, yes. Yum yum yum.”

“I've known the guy ten years and I've never found his weakness. Until today,” Sam commented.

“It's like watching a monkey ride a unicycle across a tightrope,” Danny agreed.

“Steve, whatever Tony's paying you, I'll double it if you stay on as my in-house nanny,” Jessica offered.

From the other room Luke shouted: “Hey, I'm good with her! I'm a hands-on dad!” Stomping into the kitchen, Luke leaned against the doorway with his arms crossed. “He can't be doing any better than- wait, is that the banana?”

“Yup,” Jessica confirmed.

Luke held his hand up in defeat. “Okay, I take it back. We'll find a way to pay for him. Steve, you're hired.”

Steve kept his smile fixed firmly in place as he guided the spoon into Dani's mouth again. “My skills at feeding toddlers isn't exactly what I thought I was needed for,” he pointed out.

Jessica came over to Steve and very seriously patted his shoulders. “Motherhood is a gift. Accept it graciously.” With one firm squeeze to his shoulders she scurried away into the living room. “Just keep her happy while the _real_ freedom-fighters hash out the details of the train heist. We'll call you in when we want to play with the baby again.”

Steve rolled his eyes as the occupants of the kitchen—Sam, Danny (the adult, male holder of the name), Luke, and Jessica—all emptied out into the living room, leaving Steve alone with the baby. He sighed and looked into those big brown pools of curiosity. “Want some more banana?” he asked.

“Shit! Shit!”

Steve blinked and stared at the baby. “Excuse me?”

“Shid!” Shid!”

Oh, okay. So that at least cleared up the offensive language that the baby had sounded like she was saying. But it didn't clear up much else.

“Shid?” Steve asked Dani. He set the spoon in the jar of mushed bananas and stared more closely at her. “What's 'shid'?”

Dani brought her hands up and splayed them wide, then slapped them down on the ground. She giggled, then did it again. “Shid!” She reached for Steve with chubby fingers. Steve smiled and scooped her up, hugging her to his chest.

“Shid!” she shouted again.

“Okay, okay: shid, yes. Very good,” Steve cooed nonsensically. Bouncing Dani on his hip, Steve started for the living room. “Now let's just see if mommy has a burping rag...”

“Jessica?” Steve asked once he was in the living room. He pointed one hand at Dani, lying against her shoulder. “Do you have something...”

“Oh yeah, sure.” Jessica hopped up from where she'd been seated on the arm of Luke's chair, watching Sam explain something. Jessica led Steve back into the kitchen and crouched down in front of a cupboard beneath the sink.

“Shid!” Dani shouted directly in Steve's ear. Steve shushed her and shifted her slightly, bouncing her some more.

“Yes, shid,” he agreed.

“Here you go!” Jessica emerged triumphant from beneath the sink, rag gripped firmly in hand. She helped Steve settle it onto the shoulder Dani was splayed over, kissing her head for a moment when she was done.

Patting Dani's back, Steve asked Jessica: “Do you know what she's saying? Shid?”

Jessica laughed. “Oh, that's you. She calls you 'shid'.”

Steve blinked, hand stuttering briefly on Dani's back before he resumed his careful patting rhythm. “What? I'm... 'shid'? Why am I 'shid'?”

“It's because she saw you on TV with the sentinels. Luke and I were saying 'shield' and she can't say 'l's too well so it turned into 'shid', and she doesn't know your name so she just calls you-”

“Wait wait wait. Can you... Wait.” Steve's mind was reeling as he tried to parse out what Jessica had just so casually explained. “I was on TV?”

Thirty seconds later Steve found himself seated in Luke and Jessica's living room, watching hundreds of videos of himself on every display they could cobble together, a baby burping up on his shoulder.

Of all the things he'd experienced since moving to Tony's ghetto, this had to be the most surreal.

Steve turned away from the footage of him bringing his shield down on the sentinels neck, instead choosing to watch himself supervising a food distribution in the Philadelphia ghetto. That's was three weeks ago—after the felon's ghetto with Jennifer, but before Erskine's... Erskine. It was a good day. Kids and families getting the food they needed, thanking Steve even though he hadn't done much more than supervise the distribution and act as back up for the original food-gathering operation. 

“Why is there footage of all this?” Steve asked. 

Sam shrugged quickly, steadfastly staring at the floor. “People got cameras. People uploaded that shit.”

Luke made a  _ noise _ . Steve looked over at him, stared hard, but he was staring at the floor, too. A suspicion grew in Steve's mind. 

“Did Tony do this?” He wanted to growl the words, to shake Luke or Danny or Jessica down for the information. But Dani was still propped up on his shoulder, so instead he spoke in a falsely high happy voice. Dani spit up some of her banana on Steve's shoulder. He wiped her mouth with the rag while he continued to stare down the adults in the room. 

Jessica was the one who finally broke. “You need to tell him before he goes to Tony and finds out from him.” She said the words to  _ Sam _ , of all people. Steve blinked and turned his attention to his friend. 

Sam glared at Jessica. “You don't know Stark would tell him the truth! Probably take credit for it if he thought it'd get him on Steve's good side,” he huffed. 

“Sam,” Steve cooed as menacingly as he was able. He rubbed Dani's back soothingly. “Tell me what's going on.”

“So, some of these angles...” Sam gestured at the display screens, “they _may_ have been from Redwing. And I _may_ have uploaded them wherever I could: TV, 'net, even the audio files through the radio.”

“Tony gave you those upgrades...” Steve said, realization dawning on him slowly. “So _you_ could more readily... what? Spread my face around?”

Abruptly Steve gasped. “Johnny Storm! He _knew_ me! Before we ever met, he said he'd seen what I'd done at Jennifer's, but he wasn't there. And the vendor on the street-”

“Wait, what? Who? What vendor?”

“- _he_ knew me, too! He must have seen me at Jennifer's, or taking down the sentinels,” Steve plowed, ignoring Sam. Incredulous at this invasion of his privacy, Steve gaped at Sam. “Sam, what the _h_?!”

Silence fell over the room. Then, very quietly, Jessica started to giggle. Danny and Luke joined in a moment later, with Sam struggling valiantly not to join in. Steve steamed silently, staring daggers at Sam and just _daring_ him with his eyes to go ahead and laugh along with them. 

“'What the h', Steve? Really?”

“I'm holding a _baby_ ,” Steve growled at Sam.

Jessica waved a hand, taking a break from her giggle fit to throw a thumb over her shoulder at Luke. “It's okay, really. With _him_ in the house, do you really think she hasn't heard a swear word or two?”

“Why is there video of me everywhere?!” Steve shouted, cutting through the laughter. Then he winced and bounced Dani, worried she might start to fuss. He glanced down to see she had fallen sound asleep on his shoulder, mouth moving minutely to suck at an absent nipple. Steve sighed in relief. At least he hadn't scared the baby.

“Because you're... you, Steve,” Jessica pointed out gently. “After Jennifer's, people were hooked. They wanted to know more, see more.”

“Sam was there,” Steve pointed out. “And Tony. Anyone removed two seconds from mob mentality should have realized that Tony's the one they should care about. Tony's the one who _runs_ this whole operation, who gets the food and the supplies and the medicine to everybody within ten ghettos of here. Why aren't there videos of _Tony_ everywhere?”

Luke shrugged. “There are. But Tony's...”

“Not so tactful,” Danny tried.

“I was gonna say 'an asshole,' but hey, whatever works,” Luke said with a shrug.

Brows drawn low in irritation, Steve argued: “Tony's a saint. He's almost single-handedly brought food, medicine, and housing to tens of thousands of people. They should love him.”

“But they don't,” Luke pointed out.

“They love _you_ ,” said Jessica.

Steve hesitated, mouth falling open as he searched for words. Videos of his own displays of heroics played out in front of his eyes as he tried to explain, to make them understand... Steve bounced Dani gently and pressed his nose to her hair. But what good would it do, trying to explain? He was... out, apparently. Out there, out on everyone's TVs and radios and computers, out in the ether. Mobs were hard enough to corral when Steve was there with them, could talk to the people individually. This was... This was beyond his control.

“Fuck,” Steve grumbled.

Jessica laughed, then slapped a hand over her mouth in deference for her sleeping daughter and giggled quietly instead. Luke and Danny exchanged a _look_ which consisted of a lot of eye-rolling and smug expressions. Sam came over and put his hand to Steve's shoulder (the one Dani wasn't currently occupying), and leaned down to look him in the eye. “Welcome to being a hero, buddy.”

Steve wanted to explain that he _wasn't_ a hero, that a hero _saved_ people, and he... All he seemed to be good for is losing people, not saving them. Bucky, Erskine: even going back to his mother and father (though him and his mother were probably better off after his father died). He was no hero: he was hardly even a good guy, on his grouchier days. Maybe he could be a good person, one day. But not yet. Not _now_. Steve Rogers, angry kid from the Brooklyn ghetto who just wanted to be strong enough to protect everybody—that guy wasn't worthy of that level of esteem.

But now wasn't the time for self-doubt or personal epiphanies. Now was the time for planning. Especially considering they were on a train's timetable. Steve rubbed his hand on Dani's back as he stood up and away from the screens that were still looping videos of his so-called heroism. “Jessica, why I don't you show me where I can put her down and we go over the plan again?” 

Jessica pouted at Steve, but stood up and led him to a small back room with a crib. “But you're so good with her,” she whispered as Steve gently laid Dani down. “She's going to start fussing the moment you leave.”

Carefully Steve tucked a blanket around Dani, stroking his hand along the dark brown fuzz of hair framing her head. “She'll be fine,” he whispered back. “I'm sure we can schedule some playdates in the future if mommy and daddy want a night alone. Sam and I would be happy to have her over.”

They left the room and Steve closed the door carefully, watching Dani through the narrowing crack until it was shut. She was still sleeping peacefully. Jessica nudged Steve's arm as they started back for the front room. “Or you and  _ Tony _ could have her over one night. The two of you would make a great pair of uncles for her. Spoil her rotten.”

Steve scrunched his nose up at the implication. Seems like everyone had gotten the wrong idea about him and Tony—or the right one, too far in advanced. Either way, he didn't like the assumption about his love life, when he didn't even  _ have _ a love life. It'd be a lot easier to grin and bear the teasing if he was actually getting some satisfaction from a relationship with Tony.

“There isn't a 'me and Tony',” Steve reminded her.

“Yet.”

And yeah, Steve couldn't argue that. So he kept his mouth shut and followed Jessica back to the living room.

The matrix of displays that had been showing Steve's recorded exploits were now blessedly switched over to the information they needed to go over for the heist.

Danny was holding a keypad that controlled the displays and sitting on the back of one couch, Sam was sitting next to him, rear-end parked more traditionally on the cushions. Jessica went to join Luke on the arm of his overstuffed armchair, leaving Steve to join Sam on the couch.

“Alright, so let's start with what we know. The train leaves from the west at ten fifteen. According to every train we've watched on this route, that means it should reach the walls of New Versailles at exactly two o'clock. The distance of the track it travels on is fifteen hundred miles, give or take a few dozen.”

Jessica cut in. “That means the train's moving at about four hundred miles per hour. We've never been able to clock it before, but thanks to Tony sending Happy out for a drive, we got the track distance and managed to take some accurate readings of start time and end time,” she explained.

“The problem is, we don't have anything that goes four hundred miles an hour. Not even those wack-a-doo jet packs that Tony's been working on clock those speeds. He's got some rockets that probably do, but they don't do us much good in this situation,” Luke continued.

“Although my craft uses the same maglev principles that the trains run off, I can't maintain superconducting temperatures. I just don't have the energy necessary,” Jessica explained.

Steve frowned. Just like Tony had said last week, it all came down to energy in the end.

“So what's the solution?” Sam asked. Steve looked to Jessica for the answer—Tony wouldn't have sent the pair of them here to help out if they hadn't already come up with a solution.

Jessica beamed. “The train itself. It has to slow down as it goes through ghettos. It's just for a few seconds—no more than two minutes at the longest. But it  _ does _ slow down. I used my spy network the other week to test it. We were down in Baltimore, one of us on one end of the city and the other on the other end. Using some walkie talkies we coordinated and timed how long the train took to enter the city and then leave. It was about four minutes. The part of the city that the train runs through is eight miles long.”

“So it slows down to one hundred and twenty miles an hour withing city limits,” Steve said, after taking a second to do the math. “Can your craft do that?”

Jessica grinned. “It can do about a hundred, if I really push it.”

Steve raised his eyebrows. “Which means we'd be hitting a train moving twenty miles an hour faster than we are.”

Luke shrugged. “It's not going to be easy, but we can tuck and roll. I've got my own nanite shield built into my skin—it doesn't protect my internal organs against impact damage, but twenty miles an hour'll be slow enough for that not to be a big deal. For Danny and Sam, we're leaving up to you and your shield. Tony says you can make a bubble.”

“I've never done that,” Steve protested. His mind silently added _around Tony_.

Jessica shrugged. “He says you can.”

Steve rubbed the back of his neck. So much for holding something back from Tony. “Yeah. Yeah, a bubble's no problem. But I'd have to roll it, to compensate for the acceleration.”

“Can you do that?” Luke asked.

Steve shrugged. “I've never tried.”

“And that's why you're here today!” Jessica said brightly. “Now come on: I'll bring some snacks up to the roof and we can take turns pushing you off.”

Which was how Steve found himself perched on Jessica's roof, a cooler of some of Tony's illegal alcohol between Danny, Jessica, Luke, and Sam as they sat back and smirked at Steve.

Steve peered over the ledge at the thirteen-foot, give or take, drop. “I can't really roll myself if there's no forward momentum,” he observed.

“You asking for a push?” Luke asked, laughing.

Steve grimaced, staring over the ledge for another moment. “No,” he finally replied. Taking a breath, he walked back across the roof towards where the group was sitting. He gave them all a healthy glare. “If I break my legs, Tony's gonna blame you guys, you know,” he pointed out.

Luke shrugged and gulped at his drink. “I'll take that chance. Pipsqueak doesn't intimidate me.”

Steve twisted his lips unhappily at Luke's little jab, but stayed silent. Didn't need to give these guys even  _ more _ fodder for their teasing over Steve and Tony's as-of-yet non-existent relationship. 

Taking a breath, Steve rubbed the backs of his hands together and squinted down the roof, towards the edge where sky met tiles.  _ Okay _ , he thought to himself.  _ Okay. Okay. Just...  _ go. 

Steve pushed off to a running start, as well as he could without losing his footing on the uneven rooftop. The group behind him cheered as he picked up speed, but Steve ignored them. Just a few more paces, and... Steve leaped over the edge of the roof, arms pinwheeling before he fought against his instincts and brought his hands together. His shield bubbled out from his palms in an instant, a smooth, even sphere stretching a foot in each direction from himself. Ducking his head forward, Steve tried his best to do what they were here for: he tucked and rolled.

The shield hit the ground hard, bouncing Steve around inside it. He yelped as he smacked his face against the golden light, then groaned as the force of the impact set into his bones. Releasing the shield, Steve bent over to rub at his ankles, which were sending shooting pains through his nervous system. “Ow, ow, ow,” he grumbled. Nothing was broken, or even sprained, from what he could tell. Just hurt, for a moment.

“Alright?” Sam shouted down from the rooftop. Steve squinted up in the morning sunlight to see Sam standing at the edge, peering over in concern. Steve waved him off, then reached up to rub at his cheek. He'd bit the inside of it when he smacked his face into his shield. Ow.

“Alright!” Steve shouted back. “Not going to be a safe landing at twenty miles an hour, though.”

Steve went over to the ladder on the side of the roof and climbed back up to where everyone was sitting. “I knocked around inside the shield just as much as I would have hitting the ground without it. It doesn't absorb any of  _ my _ momentum: just the momentum of stuff coming at me.”

Jessica tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Could you make it more solid?” she asked.

Steve narrowed his eyes at her. “I think it's pretty solid. My face can attest to that,” he grumbled.

Jessica rolled her eyes. “No: I mean like a cushion. Can you make it more solid  _ throughout _ : like suspending fruits in jello. The jello moves, but you stay safe! The more density you have between yourself and the ground, the more the impact will be absorbed before it reaches you.”

_ Oh _ . Steve thought about this. He'd only ever projected his shield out flat in front of him or around him—always as some sort of surface on a plane. He'd never tried to make it thicker.

“I can try...” he said cautiously.

Jessica nodded, pushing herself up to walk over to Steve. “All I've ever seen you do is project the shield on the x and y axis. You need to extend it into the z axis, too.”

Steve stared at her. Jessica rolled her eyes.

“Here. I'll get in here with you...” Jessica shimmed her way between Steve's arms, up against his chest. Steve shot a nervous look over to Luke, but he was just grinning and sipping at his drink. Obviously not worried about Steve trying to get one over with his wife, then. Which Steve would never, of course.

Jessica brought Steve's palms up for him, in front of them both. “Okay, now when you bring them together, pull the light towards us. Like you're collapsing the sphere in, but instead of decreasing the radius, keep that the same and just...” Jessica brought Steve's hands together and the shield flared to life, “...stretch.”

To Steve's surprise, it worked. He tugged on the shield with one hand and held it in place with the other—not physically, but in some sort of sense—and the shield  _ stretched _ , thickening up, coming towards him but keep as big as before. 

Jessica bounced in his arms. “See! Alright, drop it and lemme out, and try it that way. Pull it all the way into yourself so you can't even move. Like an egg in a chicken.”

Steve dropped the shield and squinted at Jessica as she moved away from him. “An egg in a chicken?”

Jessica waved a hand. “Physics joke. How do you keep an egg safe if you're gonna drop it off a roof? Keep it inside the chicken.”

As Steve walked to the back of the roof again so he could get a good running start, he mulled that over. “You got an education, didn't you?” he asked Jessica. “The things you say—it's technical terms for the stuff, not just things you've figured out yourself.”

Jessica grinned. “One of the benefits of control an analogue spy network instead of Sam's Redwing is your reach can extend past New Versailles' mists. So, yeah. I might have stolen myself an education.”

“That's amazing,” Steve commented earnestly. “Really, that's... Do you think you could disseminate it? That information, the education you stole? Do you think you could work out a way to distribute it to everybody?”

“Patience, Steve,” Danny cut in. “One foot in front of the other. Today we steal the supplies people need to live. Tomorrow, maybe you can discuss with Jessica stealing an education.”

“Right. Right, sorry.” Steve shook his head and grinned ruefully. “Got ahead of myself.”

Jessica smiled, tucking a lock of silken brown hair behind her ear. “It's okay. Tony has a way of bringing like minds together—I'm sure he knew you and I would team up on this eventually. But: first thing first. Cocoon yourself, Steve.”

Steve laughed at the visual before bringing his palms up in front of him. Concentrating, He brought his shield up... and  _ in _ . He brought it so close he could feel the light tickling against his skin, pressing there like a solid, untouchable surface. He nodded to himself. He took a step forward... and fell flat on his face, as his leg bumped into his solid shield and he overbalanced. For a moment Steve let himself roll along the roof, suspended in his shield of light. Then he dropped it and fell the foot or so to the tiles. 

Steve sighed, staring up at the grey sky. “Okay. So: have to actually leave my legs enough space to move,” he noted aloud.

The group watching him was in an uproar, laughing themselves silly. Steve huffed and pushed himself upright, dusting off his blue coat. “Yeah, yeah: I'm a dork. Sam already knew that,” he grumbled good-naturedly. He pointed an accusatory finger at Sam. “Why don't you upload video of  _ that _ to everyone? Then maybe they'll stop hero-worshipping me.”

Sam snorted. “Okay, number one: already uploaded, because that shit was  _ amazing _ . Number two: pretty sure it's just gonna endear you to the public even more, sorry to say.”

Steve rolled his eyes. Great. Focusing back at the task on hand, Steve rubbed the backs of his hands over each other and stared forward. He'd have to form the sphere once he was off the roof, was what'd he'd have to do. He couldn't run with the solid form around him, and adjusting it to follow his strides required a level of skill he simply didn't possess—not at the moment, at least, and they only had a couple of hours before they needed him to have this right.

“Gimme a minute,” Steve said. Then he brought his hands together, forming the sphere tight around his body once again. It took maybe four seconds for him to bring the light directly against him. Releasing the shield, he shook out his hands and tried again. And again. He repeated the process until he was certain he could bring the shield up around him and solid in half a second.

“Okay. Here we go.” One breath, then two, then Steve was off running again for the edge of the roof. The second his feet left the tiles, he brought his hands together and _pulled_ the shield to him, wrapping himself up in light. 

Steve hit the ground and rolled, suspended in his cushion of light. He barely felt the impact. When he rolled enough that he was facing the ground he let go of the shield, landing easily onto his knees. He could probably even decrease the size of the shield (radius, Jessica had called it) until he touched down on the ground, now that he thought about it. Still, a foot drop was a pretty big improvement.

Hollers and cheers drifted down to him from the roof. Steve looked up to see everyone waving at him happily. Sam was giving him two big thumbs up, and Luke was pumping his fist in the air. Steve ran a shaky hand through his hair, flashing them all an exhilarated smiled. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: “Okay: now who wants to try it with me?”

Two hours later and Steve was settled in the back of Jessica's cruiser, flying as fast as they could down to the Baltimore ghetto. She wasn't pushing it to one hundred yet: she had to conserve that energy for the heist itself. But they were cruising along at a solid seventy, eight miles an hour, making them the fastest thing around for hundreds of miles.

Steve peered at the controls and displays Jessica was navigating effortlessly in the front of the circular little craft. “How do you not get caught By sentinels?” he asked curiously.

Jessica pointed over at a little screen with a bunch of concentric circles on them, and a little line sweeping through them. “Tony built me a sentinel detector. They've got a real specific energy signature, apparently. Before he hooked me up with that, I was just faster than them,” she bragged with a laugh.

Steve nodded and sat back into his seat between Danny and Sam, Sam with his headscarf left back at Jessica and Danny's. Steve watched the world speed by him faster than he'd ever seen before. He was grateful for the clear plastic bubble wrapped over their heads, keeping the wind out. Though he knew he was going to have to be out there in faster winds than even this shortly.

They pulled into the Baltimore ghetto about thirty minutes before the train was scheduled to arrive. Sam sat back in his seat and cocked his head, listening carefully. “Redwing's got eyes on it,” he confirmed. “Looks like...” his eyes flickered rapidly, the way they did when he was bouncing between nanobots quickly. “Two hundred miles out.”

“Thirty minutes,” Jessica translated, doing the math faster than Steve could have. “Right on schedule.”

Jessica maneuvered her craft so that it was just outside of city limits, hidden behind some abandoned warehouses, given over to rust and rot. Jessica breathed slowly and tapped out some things into her displays. She talked while she worked, probably as a way to calm herself rather than in any real attempt to relay information to the men in her craft. Steve empathized with the feeling—he'd certainly repeated enough plans ad nauseam to Bucky, until he told Steve to shut it calm down, the words usually accompanied with a loving smack upside the head.

“So I've got my route through the city,” Jessica chattered away. “It shaves off two miles as the crow flies. The route the train cuts through the city is pretty damn straight, but mine is straighter. That'll allow me to catch up to you guys even though I'm going twenty under what the train can pull. Remember: once you drop, you have less than four minutes to find the supplies, detach the car they're in, and hook it up to my craft. Four minutes. After that, you're going too fast for me to catch up, even going the route I go.”

Steve and the three other men nodded.

“And between Sam's information and mine, I figure I've narrowed down the cabin that are carrying the supplies we need to these four. That _should_ give you just about enough time to check through the cars, then detach the one with the supplies.” Jessica blew out a shaky, drumming her fingers on the dashboard of her craft. “I think.”

“Don't worry about us, baby,” Luke reassured her, leaning over to drop a kiss on her cheek. “Just keep flying steady and this'll be over before you can blink. We'll be home in time to tuck Dani in, tonight.”

Jessica nodded firmly, shoulders squaring. “Right. Can't leave her with Tony. That man would end up dropping her off his roof just to test out some new invention.” She glanced back at Steve and Sam. “If Luke and I both die, Dani goes to Danny. If all three of us go, she goes to Tony. I  _ really _ don't want to leave my kid with him, though, so. Do your best to make sure none of you die?”

“As long as you do the same,” Luke ordered her.

Sam cocked his head. “Ten miles out.”

“Right.” Jessica wrapped her hands around the flight controls firmly, knuckles cracking. “Gimme a countdown, Sam.”

Five seconds later, Sam said “nine.” Ten more seconds “eight.” Ten more: “seven.” At four miles Sam announced “brakes are coming on. It's slowing down.” At one mile, Jessica punched her craft into the sky, slamming the controls forward to accelerate. It hit a hundred miles per hour just as the train was hitting the city limits, just two cars back from the  engine . Steve and the rest of them pulled aviator goggles over their heads, to protect their eyes from the wind.

Jessica slapped a button on her control panel and the plastic bubble that had been over their heads slid away, exposing them to the wind and fury of the train rushing beneath their feet. Steve, Sam, and Luke all struggled up on top of their seats, leaning over one side of the craft. Jessica nudged her controls just slightly to compensate for the uneven weight distribution, and flew them level over the speeding train.

“Six, seven, eight,” Jessica was counting under her breath. “Okay, here we go! On 'jump', that's three... two... one... jump!”

They jumped, Steve bringing his hands together and  _ pulling _ , stretching out his bubble so it would form around all of them, bind them all together, absorb the impact. They hit the roof of one of the cars with a bounce. Steve released his shield immediately so they wouldn't roll straight off the side. They landed hard on the roof, Danny tumbling backwards before Luke grabbed him and held, Sam slipping before finding a grip with his fingertips. Steve pressed himself down flat, wind whipping over his head as the train stormed forward through the ghetto. 

“Three minutes forty-five seconds!” Sam shouted. He was their link-up to Jessica. Steve nodded. No time to catch their breaths.

The four men crawled their way across the roof of the train until they reached a break in the cars. One by one they dropped down to the small ledge between the cars. Sam moved forward to tap at the keypad, Jessica in his ear relaying the code. Ten digits later, they were in, the door sliding open in front of them. The four men hurried inside, Sam pressing the contact so it slid shut behind them. 

Lifting his goggles to his forehead, Steve scanned the room. It was filled with seemingly unmarked boxes. He frowned and grabbed a penlight from an inside jacket pocket, flicking it on. UV stamps on the packages—Tony had told him that would be a possibility and slipped him the penlight. “Not this one,” Steve told the others. The box listed a series of computer parts. The rest would be the same, for this cabin. Steve flicked off his light and nodded to the others. “We've got one in front and two behind to check. Up front first.”

They moved quickly, Sam opening and shutting the door out of this cabin and the door into the next one in rapid succession. Steve immediately bent in front of a box and flashed his light on it, scanning it in a quick grid for any lettering. “Three minutes,” Sam announced, just as Steve's penlight stuttered over some words. Precious metals. Not this one.

“Back,” Steve announced curtly. Sam opened the doors for them, the wind howling around them in brief as they slipped from one cabin to another, and then again. Outside the door to the third cabin, Sam hesitated, taking a moment longer than he had last time.

“Sam!” Steve shouted over the roaring wind.

“It's not working!” Sam shouted back. Steve shoved past him to look. The keypad was flashing red. Well, shoot.

“Door's jammed,” Steve called back. “Looks like security knows we're here.”

“Allow me.” Danny pushed his way forward. Steve stepped back to where Sam and Luke were waiting. Danny took a moment, eyes closed and hands pressed against the door lock. Then he pulled back his fist and punched straight through the steel face of the wall. Steve blinked. He knew about Danny's sub-dermal “iron fist” implants, but it was another thing to see it in action. Danny pulled back, flexing his fist as he removed it from the mess that remained of the lock. The door slid open before them.

“After you,” Danny said graciously. Steve nodded. Alright then.

Steve hurried through the door, Sam trailing close behind him. Luke and Danny were in after that, sliding the door shut manually. Steve flashed his light on the boxes. _Wheat, 10 pounds_. He turned back to the others and flashed a thumbs up. “This is it!”

Danny and Luke nodded, hurrying to the opposite end of the train together. Sam and Steve stuck to the side they were already on, Sam pulling equipment from the rucksack on his back. They needed to secure the carabiners to both sides, in order to hook up the steel cables that Jessica would be dropping down to them. After that, they had to plant the explosives that would blow the connections from this train. Sam and Danny were doing the technical work—Steve and Luke were along for the muscle.

The wind whipped at Steve's hair, making his eyes tear up. Quickly he pulled his goggles back down over his eyes, Sam doing the same before bending to his task. Steve scanned the skies for Jessica, knowing he wouldn't see her yet but unable to help himself all the same.

“Two minutes!” Sam shouted.

Steve didn't see the blow coming. His head knocked into the side of the train with such force it cracked one lens of his goggles, sending him reeling. He pulled himself back together just in time to see a flash of silver slicing through the air at his chest. Gold met silver as Steve brought his shield up just in time.

“Zemo!” Steve gasped.

It was Baron Zemo, in the flesh. His face was covered by some sort of synthetic skin mask, turning him into a grotesque caricature of who he once was. His sword slashed away from Steve, mouth curling up in anger through the slit in the mask that was made for it.

“Steven Rogers. We meet again.”

His sword slashed forward again, but Steve kept his shield firmly in place. It bounced harmlessly off once again. Steve growled at the man.

“What the hell are you doing on here, Zemo? Supervising the transport of some low-priority goods cross-country: sounds like a demotion to me. You have some superiors in that walled city of yours that are less than happy with how your last guard duty turned out?”

Zemo sneered through his mask, stalking along the edges of Steve's shield like a jungle cat, waiting for his opening. “Your ignorance into such matters is outpaced only by your extraordinary confidence that you know what is _right_ , my foolish boy. You keep this up, and one day soon you might just find out what has been kept hidden from you. And trust me-” Zemo pressed his mask to the shield, sparks flying at the contact, “you will _not_ be pleased with what you find.”

“Stop speaking in riddles, Zemo!” Steve shouted over the roaring wind. “The fanciest language can't hide that what you and your type do in New Versailles is wrong. We're liberating this stuff for the people!” Steve gestured behind him to indicate the train cabin. “Food, medicine, clean water! That's all the people want! We're not asking for your precious metals or computer hardware! We just want to be able to survive!”

“You can _try_ ,” Zemo hissed. He flicked his sword to the side, doing something complicated with his wrist. Steve watched his movements with a sort of intellectual interest: he wasn't concerned. He had his shield. Except when Zemo slashed forward this time, the silver of his sword shone differently. Steve flinched out of the way at the last moment, something inside him telling him to _move_. The sword cut through his shield like it wasn't even there, embedding itself a hair's breath above Steve's head. His actual hair was ruffled by its passing.

“One minute!” Sam shouted. Jessica would catch up to them in fifteen seconds to lower the ropes down. Steve needed to keep Zemo off Sam's back for just sixty. He could do that.

Instinctually Steve shoved his shield out, knocking it hard against Zemo in an unconscious echo of his first fight against this man. Zemo tried to sweep to the side, to duck out of the way, but given the small amount of space between the cabins, he wasn't able to avoid Steve's shield entirely. It clipped the side of his face, knocking his mask askew. With a growl Zemo slashed back, striking Steve along his bicep. He clasped the cut, red welling up from it to stain the blue of his coat. Lashing out, Steve threw his shield into Zemo again. Zemo stumbled, mask inhibiting his sight. Zemo ripped the thing off, sending the grotesque mask tumbling over the side of the train at one hundred and twenty miles per hour.

With a shout Zemo rose back up, slashing his sword at Steve. His face... Steve stumbled, dropping to one knee as the sword slashed harmlessly overhead. His face was even more grotesque than the mask that had covered it. It was melted, deformed, like a handle half-burnt down, like he'd been dipped in acid and then wrung out to dry. Steve rolled to the side as his sword came after him again, launching his shield at Zemo's feet. That threw him off balance, sending him hurtling towards the side of the train. He caught onto a bar at the last second. On instinct Steve rushed forward, to stop him from tumbling to his death, but Zemo slashed one-handed at Steve, keeping him back.

Overhead, a new sound. Steve glanced up for just a second, to confirm that it was Jessica. She was dropping the steel cables down, two cars ahead of them, and letting the extra momentum the train had on her slowly bring her back into position. Sam grabbed the first cable and hooked in place, and Jessica kept sliding back, holding he craft perfectly steady as the second cable dragged back to Danny and Luke.

“Thirty seconds!” Sam shouted unnecessarily.

Steve glanced at Zemo, who was barely holding on. Gesturing towards him but unwilling to take a step forward at the risk of getting stabbed, Steve shouted. “Take my hand! We're about to detach the car! You can stay on this one ahead of us safely!”

Zemo ignored him. Instead he screamed: “Don't you want to know what we did with your precious Bucky Barnes?”

Steve's blood ran cold. “Bucky's dead!” he shouted.

Zemo's lips curled upward, face twisting sickeningly through all the creases and ridges of his melted flesh. “Bucky was dead. Bucky is saved.”

The explosives blew, just like they were supposed to. Zemo was knocked lose from the train so fast Steve couldn't rush forward, couldn't grab ahold. As the car rocked and rolled beneath their feet, it was all Steve could do to hold on himself.

“That's zero seconds! Hang on!” Sam shouted. Steve didn't need telling twice. With one unsteady jerk, the cabin came free of the others and lifted up into the sky. The bottom of it dragged along the roof of the next cabin, as the train picked up speed and Jessica's craft slowed further down with the extra weight. But then they were clear, train car rocking in the air beneath Jessica's craft as she sped away.

Sam slapped Steve on the arm, hollering joyfully. “We did it!” he shouted. He grabbed Steve's arm and shook him roughly. “We did it! The crazy ass plan _worked_!”

Steve grinned shakily over to Sam and nodded. “It did!” he confirmed, with slightly less enthusiasm. Worrying his lower lip beneath his teeth, Steve looked back down to the ground far below them. The bullet train was zooming away, already pushing speeds two, three times faster than Jessica's craft could manage. The track was a glittering line beneath them, getting thinner by the minute. Steve thought he saw a black speck along the side of the track, unmoving.

They dropped the cabin off in one of Tony's warehouses. Pepper and Rhodey were there to greet them. Rhodey grinned and slapped hands with the returning victors while Pepper ducked in the cabin quickly and started cataloguing everything on her tablet.

Luke shoved his hands in his cargo pant pockets and grinned over at Sam and Steve. “Job well done, you two. How about it: celebratory drinks back at ours?”

Sam was already nodding his head when he turned to Steve, who just shrugged. “You go,” he encouraged Sam. “I'm gonna...” Steve waved a hand vaguely and glanced over his shoulder. He didn't feel like celebrating, just now.

Jessica laughed, breaking the slightly awkward silence that had descended. She patted Luke on the chest meaningfully. “Of course: you probably want to celebrate with someone other than _us_ ,” she observed. She winked exaggeratedly, then laughed again as she led Luke and Danny back to her no worse for wear hovercraft.

Sam shot Steve a concerned look. “You cool?” he asked.

Steve nodded. “Yeah. I'm cool. Just a little shook up, seeing Zemo again.”

“Yeah, so, you wanna tell me what the _hell_ that was?” Sam asked.

Steve shook his head, ran a hand through the back of his hair. “I have no idea,” he admitted. “I just... need some time alone, I think.”

“Alright man. See you back at the apartment.” Sam reached out and they slapped hands, bumping fists at the end. “Don't let yourself get too broody. You know how you get.”

Steve rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “Yeah. I know how I get.”

When the four of them had left, Steve turned to find Happy in the warehouse, tracking him with a stern eye.

“Mr. Stark said to bring you back with me,” Happy said. “If you don't object.”

Steve bit down on a confused little smile. Suddenly, being alone tonight seemed like a worse option, in light of an alternative. “Alright,” Steve agreed. Happy seemed surprised he acquiesced so quickly. Steve just stuck his hands in his pockets and followed the driver. At least he was still capable of surprising somebody.

When they reached Tony's apartment, Steve headed up on his own, with a nod to Happy for the drive. Whatever he expected when he stepped into Tony's office, it wasn't to be bowled over almost immediately by an overly concerned Tony Stark.

“You're _bleeding_ , for fuck's sake,” was the first thing Tony said to him.

Steve glanced down at his arm, having almost forgotten the scratch Zemo gave him. As he lifted it to get a better look at the cut, fresh blood welled up, staining his jacket some more. “Oh. I guess I am.”

“Come here,” Tony grumbled, dragging Steve with him to his apartment in the back. Steve allowed himself to be led, content to hand the reigns over to someone else for the time being. Even though the whole operation had been Jessica Jones' brainchild, Steve was increasingly feeling like people were turning to him, looking to him, expecting him to just... be their hero. And the point had certainly been drive home by the overwhelming amount of home videos Sam had apparently been uploading all this time.

“The operation was a success,” Steve told Tony. He found himself being pushed down onto Tony's bed as Tony gingerly peeled off Steve's coat, focus wholly on Steve's injury. Steve started laughing abruptly. Tony paused, shocked, and stared worriedly at him.

“What?” he asked.

Steve just shook his head and shrugged. “Nothing, I just... I kinda imagined any circumstance with me on your bed, you taking of my clothes, it'd be a lot different from this.”

Tony grinned at that, heading over to his bathroom. He returned a moment later with a first aid kit, which he started unpacking on the bed alongside Steve. “Me too,” he admitted. “But you're such a boy scout, I'll have to take what I can get.”

Steve didn't even bothering to deny that; he just sat patiently as Tony cleaned his cut with antiseptic and then wrapped it up in cotton and gauze. Tony rubbed his thumbs alongside the bandage when he was done, smiling softly up at Steve. “Good?” he asked.

“It wasn't even bothering me before,” Steve reassured him. “But yeah. Good. Thank you, Tony.”

“I already knew you guys pulled off the heist, you know,” Tony told Steve as he tossed his first aid kit off the bed and crawled onto it with Steve. “Got eyes everywhere, you know me.”

“Did you see how this happened?” Steve asked, indicating his arm. If anyone would know how Zemo had done what he'd done, how his sword had managed to penetrate Steve's impenetrable shield, it'd be Tony.

“Tell me,” Tony prompted.

“Zemo got through my shield,” Steve said, shivering slightly. Tony's arms folded around his shoulders and Steve found he didn't _want_ to push Tony away. He let Tony stay where he was. “How they hell did he do that?”

“He saw your shield before, right? On the walls of New Versailles?”

Steve nodded his head miserably.

“It's an Schrödinger switch. Somehow his sword generates an observation-free field, changing your shield from solid-state particulate light back into a wave, or some indiscernible third state where its both.” Tony grimaced. “I didn't think they had that kind of tech. That's the sort of thing _I_ was working on. I didn't think they had anyone smart enough to build something like that.”

Steve snorted softly at Tony's unabashed ego. Tony glanced worriedly at him, then realized he was being laughed at because he smiled and shook Steve's shoulders gently. “Hey, I'm just giving you my honest assessment of the situation.”

“I know you are,” Steve reassured him. Glancing shyly up at Tony from beneath long lashes, he smiled softly. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“Being here. Picking up the pieces.” Steve sighed and leaned into Tony, closing his eyes. “I found out I'm some kind of folk-hero, today.”

“Sam's fault,” Tony explained hurriedly.

“I know,” Steve murmured, waving away Tony's concerns. “I'm not talking about that. I just... I found out the world is looking to me, waiting for me to save them-” _Save us, Steve Rogers! Bucky was dead. Bucky is saved_. “And so, thanks. For being here. For letting me lean on you.”

“It's tough being the reliable one,” Tony agreed. He was speaking from experience, Steve knew. “You're going to have it worse than I ever had though,” he warned.

“Why's that?”

“People love you,” Tony reminded Steve with a shrug. “You're not just the one they rely on for their food, water, medicine. You're the one they _want_ to rely on. They look up to you. You're a role model, a hero.”

Steve grimaced. “I'm none of those things.”

“You are to them,” Tony told Steve plainly. Steve felt Tony hesitate, heard the unsaid _you are to me_. “Sorry about that. But this time, at least, it's not my fault.”

“It's partially your fault. Without you, I wouldn't have gotten into half the 'heroic' situations I did. And Sam wouldn't have gotten those upgrades that lets him paint videos of me across everyone's TVs to his heart's content,” Steve pointed out.

“Mmm. You'll have to come up with a way for me to make it up to you,” Tony teased.

Steve glanced over at Tony, smile growing slowly. “I'm sure I'll think of something.”

Tony's beaming smile beneath that ruffled mop of brown hair was a pretty good end to Steve's day, all things concerned. Steve was willing to count today as a win, even with the ghosts of his past trying to dredge themselves up.

 

 


	10. Prelude

 

Tony picked at the bicep of Steve's coat, fingernails tugging gently on the solid line of stitching around the arm. Steve smiled softly at him, waiting patiently until Tony sat back into his own chair on the other side of the table. Tony huffed at him as he picked up his glass.

“You know, I could have bought you a new coat. I could have bought you a _hundred_ new coats. It wouldn't have even come close to what I owe you for that train heist.”

Steve sent Tony a softly chastising look. “The coat was perfectly good. Just needed a little bit of patching up. No point resigning something to the garbage dump when a little bit of care would serve it just fine.”

“You realize that you keep making comments like that and you'll never get rid of this whole 'hero' thing you've got going on,” Tony pointed out.

Steve flushed, glancing around the little eatery. He hadn't failed to notice that they got the best seat in the house, and that the food tasted like it was made just for them. He had opted to pretend that the good service and fine dining were thanks to Tony's wealth, but all the money in the world didn't justify the way the staff was looking at them, the way the owner herself had come out to shake Steve's hand and look into his eyes with all the gratitude on earth.

“How's the distribution coming?” Steve changed the subject. Tony gave him a wry look but didn't comment on it, popping a piece of shrimp into his mouth instead. “Has everyone gotten what they needed?”

Tony nodded, wiping at his mouth before speaking. “Yup, everything's getting sent out. The time-sensitive stuff, the medicine and the fresh produce, that got distributed first. Next week we'll start going through the grains, the freeze-dried stuff, the canned goods. Non-perishables. But sure, everything's smooth sailing. Thanks to you.”

Steve coughed and glanced down at his expensive meal: noodles and vegetables and chicken meat, all sauteed up in some kind of delicious sauce. He felt less bad about eating this than he had before, considering the massive haul he'd helped bring in just a few days ago. Still... “I saw video of me on the TV yesterday,” he mumbled into his pasta. “From the train operation.”

Tony grinned. “I've seen some, too. Sam's cameras caught your good side?”

“Did they?” Steve asked, honestly curious.

Tony laughed. “Steve, handsome: you're _all_ good side.” Tony reached one hand across the table and covered Steve's own with it. Steve did his best to scowl, even though his mouth seemed determined to smile at the compliment.

“This isn't a date, you know,” Steve reminded Tony.

“Right.” Tony said. He squeezed Steve's hand with his own and then pulled away, returning to his meal. Steve clenched his hand tight to keep it from rushing across the table after Tony's.

“We're supposed to be discussing business,” Steve continued.

“Mmhmm,” Tony hummed. His eyes were twinkling at Steve as he took a sip from his glass.

“How is it?” Steve tried.

“Business?” Tony asked, raising an eyebrow. “Business is good.”

Steve sighed and helped himself to another delicious bite of food. Tony beamed at him, like nothing brought him greater happiness than making sure Steve was properly fed.

“So Jessica tells me you're her new babysitter for the foreseeable future,” Tony commented lightly. Steve nodded his head vigorously and set down his fork.

“You didn't tell me she had an education!” he accused Tony. For his part, Tony seemed to have been anticipating this interjection because he just grinned and kept eating. “She says she stole it? From Versailles? Tony, that's _huge_. Between her network and Sam's and your resources, we could distribute her education to the _world_. Eventually. With some hard work and good planning.”

Tony smiled. “I figured you and Jessica might talk to each other about that. But we can hammer out some details later. The baby? You, being adorable? That's what I want to hear about.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Babies aren't that hard. Not in small doses, at least. Everyone was acting like it was some miracle of nature or something,” Steve grumbled. “Look up video if you're so curious. I'm sure Sam's Redwing got some.”

“Already saw it,” Tony said with a grin. He leaned forward over the small table and fluttered his long, dark eyelashes at Steve. “Did Dani get you all broody? Want to settle down and raise a litter? Because, I gotta say, I'm feeling the urge myself after seeing you making faces while you tried to introduce spoon to widdle baby mouth...”

Steve rolled his eyes and tossed a piece of bread at Tony, who flinched away from the projectile while laughing.

“Aw, come on,” Tony wheedled, “you don't want to make babies with me? We could at least try. Back at my apartment. I think it might work, if we try hard enough. Repeatedly. Just: over and over again. So many times.”

Steve buried his face in his hands as his shoulders shook from laughter. “Stop it,” he groaned.

“That's what you'll be begging me when I'm through with you,” Tony promised hotly.

Steve peered at Tony from between his fingers. “Aren't there more important matters we could be discussing?”

“Can't think of anything more important than that.”

“Education, liberation, empowerment...” Steve ticked off the points on his fingers.

“I've got some very educational stuff to teach you, after I liberate those pants off your tight ass, and it will all be very empowering,” Tony countered with a leer.

“You're awful.”

“'Incorrigible', I think is the word,” Tony declared.

“A flirt,” Steve corrected.

“Only for you,” Tony promised right back.

They lapsed into silence after that, Steve smiling softly at Tony, Tony with a hopeful light in his eyes like he was willing Steve to believe him, to know it was true. Unfortunately, to Steve's perception, he was well-aware of Tony's feelings for him and how genuine they were. It just felt so irresponsible, so selfish, to reach out and _take_ , when there was so much he still needed to _give_. People wouldn't be calling him a hero if they knew how selfishly he wanted to act, how hard it was for him to resist in this quiet moment, hidden away by the darkness in the back of a small eatery, illuminated only by fickle candlelight.

An explosion rocked the building, grit from the stones showering down over Steve and Tony's heads. Steve looked across the table at Tony, eyes wide with fear.

“What was that?” he asked. Tony's mouth opened to answer when another explosion rocked them. Steve clutched the table to steady himself, ground shaking sickeningly beneath his feet.

Tony's face fell, grim lines etching themselves deeply into his handsome features. “That's an attack,” he growled.

They were off like a shot, speeding from the restaurant while the other patrons scrambled to find a safe hiding place. Tony stopped only to press a USB into the owner's hands as Steve burst his way through the front door. “Take everything on there,” Tony told the owner. Then he was out of the shop, following Steve down the street.

“It came from there,” Steve pointed ahead, once Tony had caught up with him. There was smoke rising from the northeast, and people running from that direction towards them.

“That's the train station,” Tony observed, breaths coming shorter as he put in an extra burst of speed. Steve kept up easily with him, his focus more on keeping Tony safe than anything else.

A few blocks down and they broke free of the claustrophobic tangle of ramshackle homes and businesses, their feet bringing them to a marginally more open space that was the square in front of the train station. Great big piles of black smoke were billowing off it, choking the air. Now that they were close enough, Steve could see the red lick of flames starting to engulf the building. As he watched, someone inside the station kicked open a door, and the backdraft cause another explosion, flames shooting higher to the roof of the structure. The building was a lost cause.

Tony came to a stop, panting, in front of the train station. He leaned forward and rested his hands on his knees, body trembling with frustration. Steve wanted to rush forward and help get people out of harm's way, but he knew he had to stay with Tony, get him back to his office, get a handle on the situation. So instead Steve scanned the crowd for possible threats while he pressed a soothing hand to Tony's back.

“Tony, come on,” he urged, “breathe. Think. The train station doesn't matter, does it? The tracks-”

“The tracks are blown,” Tony cut him off, not a hint of uncertainty in his words. He waved a hand down the line. “The first explosions we heard. Concussive force, not incendiary. They wouldn't blow the station without blowing the tracks.”

Steve didn't bother asking who “they” were. If Tony thought this was an attack by New Versailles, well, he'd know better than anyone. Steve trusted his judgement on this, until he had more information.

“It's ten miles back to my apartment,” Tony continued. He straightened, eyes flashing with anger. “You might be able to run that distance, but I can't. We need a ride.”

“Okay,” Steve agreed. Tony was thinking again. That was good. “Where do we get a ride?” he tried to ask.

But Tony was already rushing back the way they came, into a main thoroughfare. He waved down the first car he saw: a rust bucket sputtering along on more willpower and denial of reality than anything else. It was two cars welded together, actually: front half was some small sedan, while the back was from what used to be a pickup truck. Tony stepped nearly straight in front of the car, forcing the driver to pull to a stop. It was a kid and what looked to be his mother, maybe grandmother, who were in the car-truck.

Tony held up another USB drive, pulling it out of seemingly nowhere. “What's your name, ma'am?” Tony asked.

“May,” the woman replied, looking Tony up and down. “May Parker. This is my nephew Peter. And you are?”

“Tony Stark.”

Steve hadn't really experienced the power of Tony's name, not first-hand. Ms. Parker's entire demeanor changed with those two words: her eyebrows raised, her jaw clenched, she became instantly a woman to be reckoned with, rather than some middle-aged woman taking her nephew out on an errand.

“What is it you want from us, Mr. Stark?”

“Your car.” Tony waved his USB at Ms. Parker impatiently. “Take everything that's on there. It's more than ten thousand. That should be enough to repay you.”

Ms. Parker seemed disinclined to accept Tony's offer, her hands tightening around the steering wheel and lips pressed tight together, when the boy in the passenger seat spoke up.

“Are you Steve Rogers?”

Steve blinked. He'd figured he'd been all but forgotten in the whirlwind that was Tony Stark. Heck, he'd forgotten himself that he was standing there, that people could see him. Steve turned his attention to the young boy. He couldn't be more than fourteen, maybe fifteen, and was a skinny fourteen at that. He kind of looked like Steve when he was a teenager, except not quite as sickly and with a mop of brown hair in place of Steve's blonde.

Stepping over to lean over the window Peter was presently sticking his head out of, Steve smiled gently at the kid. “Yeah. Yeah I am. You know who I am?”

“ _Everyone_ knows who you are,” the kid breathed. Steve flushed at the adoration in his tone.

“And who are you?” Steve asked, deflecting the attention.

“I'm Peter Parker,” the kid replied. His mouth was hanging open in awe, like he couldn't believe _Steve Rogers_ was speaking to him. Steve couldn't believe some kid he'd never met was looking up to him. “I've got prosthetics like yours!” he shouted suddenly.

“ _Peter_ ,” Ms. Parker hissed.

Steve smiled disarmingly at the woman. “It's okay, Ms. Parker. I've got them too, so it's not like I'd turn him in.” Turning his attention back to Peter, Steve asked: “Do you want to show me?”

“ _Steve_ ,” Tony growled meaningfully. Steve flashed a finger behind him, a _wait_. Tony's flash and cash hadn't worked on Ms. Parker. This just might. And it would still be faster than Tony trying to jog ten miles back to his apartment.

“Sure!” Peter practically shouted. He fumbled with his hands for a minute, tugging off knit gloves. Steve noticed they were red, and wondered if that color was chosen on purpose, to imitate Steve's. One glance at the protective way Ms. Parker was watching him with Peter told him that was probably the case.

When his gloves were tugged off into his lap, Peter held his hands up for Steve to look. “See?” He waggled his wrists at Steve. “It's not the _light shield_ , like you've got. But it's nifty, too! Grapplers that let me go wherever I want, faster than even the other guys can run.”

“Those are pretty great,” Steve complimented him. “Something that gets you out of trouble fast is the best prosthetic you could have.”

“I made them myself!” Peter proclaimed proudly.

Steve raised his eyebrows. “ _Really_?”

“Lemme see.” Tony shoved his way forward, grabbing Peter's wrist. He poked at the points of contact, tugging just a little to pull a tiny strand of tubing out.

“These are carbon fiber. Nanotubes.” Tony looked at the kid. “Who gave you this?”

Peter shrugged. “Nobody. I figured it out myself.”

“Bullshit.”

“Mr. Stark!” Ms. Parker chastised him from the driver's seat. Steve winced and held up his hands.

“Sorry, sorry,” Steve apologized. But Tony's focus was still on Peter.

“Who gave you this?”

“Nobody!” Peter insisted. “I know Ava Ayala who knows Richard Rider whose uncle is Mr. Quill and _he's_ friends with Mr. Cage and _his_ wife is Mrs. Jones who got me all the school courses. The ones she snuck out of the palace.”

Steve placed his hand meaningfully on the small of Tony's back. After one more moment looking at the filaments that were hidden in Peter's wrists, he stepped back. “That's smart, kid.” Tony reached out and ruffled Peter's hair, who preened under the attention.

Steve turned to Ms. Parker. “Ma'am, I hate to do this, but we really do need your car. I assure you that the USB has every cent Tony says it has on it, and more besides.”

Ms. Parker glanced between the two men, eyes shrewd. Finally she sighed and nudged Peter. “Get your things,” she told him.

Peter hopped out of the car happily, knit gloves tucked back on and not-so-subtly measuring his height against Steve's. Tony passed the USB off to Ms. Parker as she tugged some rucksacks out of the back of the truck and divvied them up between herself and Peter. “Thank you,” Steve told Ms. Parker sincerely. He reached out to shake her hand. She took it and held, looking Steve carefully in the eyes.

“I've been let down a lot, Steven Rogers,” May cautioned him. “But Peter hasn't been. Don't be the first.”

Steve nodded seriously, maintaining eye contact with the woman. “I'll do my best, ma'am,” he promised.

The car horn honked sadly, Tony leaning hard on it behind the wheel. “Steve! Ass! In seat! Let's move!”

With one last apologetic look back at Ms. Parker, Steve hurried forward and hopped into the passenger seat of their new ride. Tony took off before he was even in, tires spinning over the loose dirt and gravel that made up the road before gaining traction and propelling them forward. Steve hung onto the top of the doorframe, hanging half out the window as he kept a sharp eye out for what they might meet down the road.

They were five miles out from Tony's home when Steve caught the scent of smoke in the air. One glance over at Tony's grim expression told him he smelled the same thing. Three miles out, and they saw the first building ablaze: one of Tony's apartment complexes, the citizens standing in the street, rushing back and forth to try and save loved ones or douse the flames. After that, it was like navigating through logs in a bonfire: building after building alight, ashes and glowing embers filling the air. Steve ducked his head inside when the air got too thick, tugging off his jacket and shirt to get to the undershirt he wore beneath them.

“Here.” Steve ripped apart his undershirt and fashioned it into two neckerchiefs. He tied one around his head, covering his nose and mouth, then held the other one out. Tony glanced over at it, then nodded grimly, giving Steve the go-ahead to tie it around his head, over his mouth and nose as he drove.

They skidded to a stop in front of Tony's apartment just in time to see it set alight by a sentinel. Tony leapt out of the car, screaming and shouting and waving his hands about to get its attention. Steve jumped from the car to go after Tony, to pull him away from whatever madness he had in mind.

“ _Why don't you come for me_?!” Tony screamed. Steve held him by his arms, tugging him back and away from the massive conflagration that once was his apartment and office. A movement caught his eye: Rhodey, shoving his way out of the second story of the building with his arms wrapped around a box. Steve let go of Tony to rush forward, holding his arms up.

“Rhodey! Drop it!”

Rhodey tossed the box over the edge to Steve, who caught it easily. Unencumbered by the awkward package, Rhodey was able to stumble his way down the steps just before they were swallowed up by the flames. The bamboo burned fast. Steve hauled the box far enough away from the building that there was no fear of it lighting, then ran back to drag Rhodey the rest of the way. He was coughing viciously, but aside from some soot staining his dark skin, seemed relatively unharmed. Steve patted him on the back and leaned down to check, getting a nod and a gentle shove from Rhodey.

“I'm good, I'm good,” he wheezed.

“You sure?”

Rhodey nodded, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “I'm good. Get him-”

Tony was rushing towards the building—no, more correctly, he was rushing towards the _sentinel_ on the other side of his building, walking steadily away from the scene of the crime.

“Tony!” Steve shouted, running forward. He reached Tony as he was racing down the alley on the right of his building, tackling Tony to the ground. Tony kicked and struggled against Steve, his body trembling in Steve's arms. Gritting his teeth, Steve pulled Tony back, away from the heat and ash of a building burning down beside them. Steve got them back out into the street in front of Tony's building before he lost his grip on Tony again. This time, Tony didn't run after the sentinel, but stood there and beat his chest.

“ _I'm right here! I'm who you want_!” Tony's voice sounded like it was shredding his throat, ripped raw from his gut. It was the scream of a man beyond reason, beyond hope.

Steve rolled back from his shins to his ass, flopping down into the mud and muck in front of Tony's apartment. He put his hands on his knees and watched as Tony screamed his heart out, raging at the loss of his buildings. Steve buried his face in his hands and breathed tightly. This was all his fault. He'd brought this wrath and ruin down onto Tony's head. He'd brought the attention of New Versailles onto him. Tony had been doing just fine before: keeping his head down just enough, staying just below New Versailles' radar. That all changed when Steve and Sam showed up.

Steve jerked, fear clawing at his throat. “Sam!” he turned to Rhodey, desperate. “I have to get to Sam. They're burning down Tony's buildings-”

Rhodey nodded, holding out his hand as he fought his way through another bout of coughing. “He's safe,” Rhodey promised. “I sent Pepper after him. Happy's gone to Luke and Jessica and Danny. She'll call me when she has him.”

For a second Steve wavered, feet leaning hard in the direction of his apartment. Behind him Tony was sobbing, wretched screams working their way out of his throat every few seconds. Steve was torn.

But then Rhodey's phone rang not ten seconds later, saving Steve from having to make the hard choice. Steve hurried forward as Rhodey fished it out of his pocket, coughing into his hand as he brought it up to his ear. “Yeah?” Rhodey choked out.

He gave the thumbs up to Steve after a couple seconds, then repeated for Steve's benefit: “So Sam's safe and he's with you? Great.” Steve nodded and sagged backwards, some of the tension leaving him. That left Tony then to deal with.

Hesitantly Steve moved for Tony, hands held out to comfort him but drawing back at the last second. Tony might not want his comfort. There was a good chance Steve was the last person in the world Tony wanted to see.

“Tony?” Steve asked, coming to a stop just behind Tony.

Wretchedly, Tony held a hand up. Steve took it in an instant, grasping it tight with both hands and letting Tony pull him down into the street. Tony turned and grabbed at Steve's shirt, shaking him angrily as tears glimmered in his eyes.

“This was Obie. This was Obie, and I'm gonna kill him.” Tony shook Steve by his shirt. Through gritted teeth he spat: “I'm gonna _kill him_ , Steve.”

“This is a step too far,” Steve agreed. “But we need to regroup. We need to pull back, assess-”

“Where's Rhodey?” Tony cut him off. Looking around like it was the first time he'd seen his surroundings since they pulled up, Tony caught sight of Rhodey behind Steve, still talking rapidly on the phone. With a grunt Tony pushed himself up, using Steve's shoulders as leverage. Steve scrambled to follow him as Tony stumbled over to Rhodey, then dropped down to the box at his feet.

Rhodey hung up the phone as Tony started rummaging through the box, making small noises of approval and disapproval as he went.

“What's in here?” Steve asked, poking at the box.

“Essentials,” Rhodey explained, giving the box a little kick. “Hard drives, portable tech, all the currency we had on USBs...”

Tony wiped his hands off on his pants as he stood up. “Weapons,” he announced grimly. “Weapons for a war.”

“Tony...” Steve started.

“No, Steve!” Tony whirled on him, jabbing a finger against his chest. “No more kindness and compassion. No more trying to fix the world through love. What they did, what just happened? That was a declaration of war. No more trying to win this through economics or technology. No more peaceful resistance or guerrilla raids. This is it. This is war. This is fight, or be erased.”

“I know, Tony.” Steve hadn't—not until he'd said it. But now that he had, he did know. It _was_ war. There was no turning back now, no diffusing tensions until they were back down to the constant state of simmering unrest they were before.

Tony nodded, like he saw something in Steve that he approved of. Turning to Rhodey, he asked him for an update. And just like that, Tony Stark, black market mogul and genius inventor, was back.

They packed up their things an hour later, while Tony's building was still red-hot and smoldering behind them. Steve didn't miss the way Tony kept his back to it, eyes glimmering wet from more than just the smoke any time he left himself stop moving for more than a moment. Rhodey and Tony had split the box that Rhodey had managed to save between them, Tony taking far less than his half of the money and supplies, since he and Steve were taking the car.

Tony and Rhodey shook hands, clasping firmly at each other's forearms. “Stay safe,” Tony made Rhodey promise.

“No getting up to any heroics without me to back you up,” Rhodey replied back.

Tony snorted. “You know me: not the heroing type. It's _this_ guy you need to be talking to.” He jerked his head back at Steve. For his part, Steve tried to look the picture of non-rabble-rousing innocence. Apparently it failed to impress Rhodey, for some reason.

“Just stay safe, too,” Rhodey told Tony.

“Yeah. Do my best.”

Steve shook Rhodey's hand too, then packed up the truck with Tony. There wasn't much left to pack. As they climbed in, Tony tossed the pouch full of USBs at Steve. “We'll get some food at the edge of the ghetto,” Tony said. “I'll put you in charge of buying us whatever else we need. Rhodey says the warehouses are all burned down, so no use going to them.”

Steve picked through the USBs carefully, plugging them each into the reader he tugged from Tony's pocket and marking them for what they were worth with a sharpie. They certainly had enough money to _pay_ for a war, if no actual supplies themselves.

“Where are going after that?” Steve asked as he worked. He glanced up to see Tony's mouth drawn into a grim line, hands clenching tight around the steering wheel as he navigated them out of the burning ghetto.

“We go to New Versailles. And we make them pay for what they did.”

* * *

 The car rattled and rolled over the pothole-ridden dirt that passed as roads this far out from the ghettos. Steve's head knocked gently against the car door frame, wind blowing gently against his face and ruffling his hair. The mid-morning light was beating at his eyes, asking him to wake up, but he'd had a long shift of driving that night and had only caught a few hours of sleep so far. He kept his eyes firmly shut and tried to tell himself to go back to sleep.

“Uh, Steve?”

Steve hummed, awake enough to not be startled by Tony's cautious words.

He snuffled his face against the door frame, keeping his eyes shut. “We there?” he asked, folding his arms against his chest in an effort to find a more comfortable position.

“Uh... Almost. But: Steve? I think you're gonna wanna see this.”

Something in Tony's tone had Steve opening his eyes without further inquiry, his tiredness leaving him. Steve blinked once and sat up, squinting through the dirty windshield at whatever it was that had caught Tony's eye.

They were coming over a large ridge, about to make their way into the valley that preceded New Versailles on its southern side. Except the valley wasn't empty. There was a thin fog sitting over it, but through the fog dark shapes were visible, dotting the flat landscape ahead. Frowning, Steve stuck his head out the car window to try and get a clearer look at what was ahead. As they crested the ridge, a banner snapped sharply in the breeze, pole stuck hard into the ground on the right of the road. Steve frowned and craned is neck, trying to catch a clear view of it. When they were a few feet in front of it, Steve saw that it was a white flag with a yellow circle in the center.

“What's that mean?” Steve asked as he slid back into his seat. Looking over at Tony, Steve was surprised to see his eyes were wide, his mouth hanging open as he leaned over the steering wheel to look at the valley below them.

“I think it means you,” Tony explained. His finger lifted off the steering wheel to point ahead of them.

Steve frowned and squinted ahead. There were more banners, he could see now as they started their slow descent down the hill. They were all dotted in the center with that yellow circle: all varying sizes and shades of yellow, ranging from the size of a fist to the diameter of one of Tony's larger display screens; from daffodil to metallic gold. The dark spots in the valley started to coalesce into discernible shapes the closer they drove. They were campsites, people parked in cars, in RVs, in ramshackle tents and shacks, thrown up in what could only have been a couple days' time. There were lines of unoccupied ground between the makeshift campsites, roads that emerged naturally from the mass of people congregating in the same place.

“What the heck...” Steve mumbled. “What is all this?”

“Steve: I think this is your army,” Tony replied, something like awe tingeing his voice.

“My...”

Their car sputtered nosily down the last few feet of the incline, axels creaking as it settled onto even ground once more. They reached the outer edges of the encampment within a few minutes. Around them, people peered into their car, casual glances to see who the new arrivals were. Slowly recognition started to spread, murmurs going up through the camp, excited cries that could be heard in the distance. Steve slouched uncomfortably down in his seat and did his best to be inconspicuous.

About halfway through the camp and the crowd became too thick for Tony to drive faster than a crawl. He sighed and stuck his head out the window, shouting down at the crowd: “I'm looking for a James Rhodes, Sam Wilson, or Jennifer Walters. Know where I can find any of those?”

Like magic the crowd parted, forming a new path off to the right. Several people were helpful enough to shout directions and point in that general direction. Tony brought his head back inside the cab and kept driving, careful of the dense mass of people still crowding their car.

Tony's words were still ringing in Steve's ears as he looked out at the crowd. _Your army_. He didn't see an army. He saw youths, some as young as fourteen, fifteen. He saw scared and angry men and women, he saw people who were underfed and overworked. He saw a thronging mass of hope, begging to be set free. But not an army.

“Rhodey!”

Tony's shout drew Steve's attention back to the situation at hand and away from his melancholy musings. Throwing the car in park, Tony hopped out and pushed his way through the crush of people to embrace his old friend. Steve stepped out after him, one foot on the running board as he scanned the crowd. Rhodey was in front of one of the relatively nicer tents, hugging it out with Tony. As Steve watched, another familiar face stepped out of the tent, eyes scanning the same way Steve's were. Steve beamed when he caught sight of him. He waved and then hopped down, racing over to Sam.

“Sam.” Steve breathed a sigh of release as grabbed his friend in for a rib-crushing hug. Some knot of tension that had been weighing low in his stomach for the past week loosened, now that he had physical confirmation that his friend was alive and well.

Steve pulled back enough to look Sam in the eyes, but kept his grip firmly on Sam's shoulders and biceps. “Rhodey said you got out okay, but-”

“Yeah,” Sam laughed. “Got out just fine. Top couple floors were hit hard, but I was awake and dressed. Took two seconds to grab what I could into a backpack and beat it down the stairs. Got out in plenty of time before the whole thing came down.”

Steve shook his head, fighting back tears. “I should have been there. Or I should have _gone_ there, made sure you were safe with my own two eyes.”

Sam shook his head, no trace of accusation in his eyes. “No way. You had bigger fish to fry than just worrying about my sorry self. Besides, I'm pretty good at taking care of myself. Managed it plenty before your scrawny ass got made big.”

“What... is all this?” Steve asked. He gestured around at the encampment, at the people, at the banners. “What are the flags?”

The look Sam gave Steve said he was being particularly dense. “It's your shield,” Sam explained. “The flags: they're your standard. These people are here for you.”

* * *

An hour later found Steve and Tony settled into the tent that Sam and Rhodey had emerged from. Turns out it was a kind of HQ for the operation they had stumbled into. Jennifer had greeted them and then taken up her post outside, acting as guard-dog for the HQ at the moment. Steve was growing more overwhelmed by the minute as Sam and Rhodey explained the situation. Tony seemed disturbingly at ease with the whole thing.

“So the numbers we've got right here right now are around five thousand,” Sam was explaining. They were gathered around a tabletop display, lit up with the information Sam was relaying. “Most of them with prosthetics. A lot of them from felon ghettos or off the grid, situations like that.”

“Off the grid?” Steve's head jerked up. He knew people from “off the grid.” “Is-?”

Sam was already grinning in response when a shout of: “Come on, let me in to see him! I knew him before he was famous!” cut Steve's question short. And answered it, pretty much at the same time. Steve popped up from his seat around the table, trying to catch a glimpse of what was happening outside the tent.

“I'm not some fucking groupie, lemme in! Yeah, yeah: nuts to you too, lady.” A second later, A man and a woman came tumbling through the front of the tent—the woman with far more grace than the man. Steve grinned and rushed over to them.

“Clint! Natasha!”

Clint “hurumphed” smugly to Jennifer who had been trying to keep him out of the tent as Steve pulled him into a hug.

“Told you he loved me,” he chided her.

Steve rolled his eyes and gave Clint a noogie before turning to Natasha. “It's great to see you,” he told her honestly.

She inclined her head slightly, eyes already moving around the tent and assessing it. “You too. Though we've certainly been seeing plenty of you of late.”

Steve flushed and rubbed the back of his neck. “Oh, uh. Have you guys been getting videos of me, too?”

“The whole world has been watching videos of you,” Natasha informed Steve gently. She patted his cheek and smiled, sharp and vicious as she teased him. Steve's shoulders sagged. There were five thousand people out there who had been watching those videos of him, evidently. He needed to stop being shocked by the fact.

“So this is who you used to hang out with?” Tony asked with a faux-haughty smirk. Steve rolled his eyes as Clint and Natasha tried to glare down Tony.

“Right, sorry, I guess I better give some introductions. This is Clint and Natasha, old friends of Sam and mine from Brooklyn. Clint and Natasha, this is Tony Stark, and his friend James Rhodes. They've been a great help-”

“We know who Tony Stark is,” Clint cut Steve off. He stalked up to Tony, chest puffed pointedly out. Natasha slinked up behind him, silent and a hundred times more threatening.

Tony glanced between the two of them, charming smile fixed firmly on his face. “Nice to meet-”

Clint shoved himself in Tony's face. “Have you been making moves on our Stevie?”

Tony's smile fell. “No...?”

“We've seen the tapes,” Natasha reminded Tony, suddenly behind him. Tony jumped.

“Guys, please,” Steve groaned, face in his hands.

Luckily Tony and Steve were saved from further embarrassment by another troupe of new arrivals. Jennifer Walters ducked her way through the tent flat, jerking a thumb over her shoulder as she walked.

“Found these stragglers causing ruckus looking for you,” she explained. Behind her entered Johnny and Sue Storm. Johnny beamed when he saw them, bouncing over to Steve and wrapping him up in a big hug.

“Hand buddies!” he crowed. He patted his ungloved hand to Steve's face while Steve squinted and accepted the affection.

Sue was busy giving Tony a much more subdued hug in greeting. Tony pressed a kiss to her cheek and then wrapped his arm around her shoulder proudly. “See: I've got friends too,” he told Natasha and Clint.

Sue raised an eyebrow at Tony and removed his hand from her shoulders with thumb and forefinger. “Whoever said we were here for you?” she asked. Turning to Steve, she strode over and shooed her brother off so she could press a kiss to either cheek. “Steve, sweetheart, you're looking much better than we last parted.”

Steve grimaced, thinking back to that tragic night in the sewers. “I couldn't look much worse,” he pointed out. Then he stopped and shook his head, because he had to ask: “What are you two even doing here?”

Johnny snorted, tossing lazy fireballs at Clint which burned out before they reached him. Clint looked vaguely haunted as he twitched away from them, glaring with his piercing blue prosthetic eyes at Johnny. “What do you mean? We're here to fight, same as everyone else.”

“We're here to bring down New Versailles,” Sue said with equal conviction.

“But what about your children?” Steve asked Sue.

Sue shrugged. “My husband is at home with them. My prosthetic is more useful than his in a fight, and we knew that one of us would have to fight. It's the only way to give our children a world worth living in.”

Steve was abruptly overwhelmed by the weight of what he was asking people to do, of what people _wanted_ him to ask them to do. Steve was going to be ordering these men and women, some of them just boys and girls, into a war. And some of them would die. Sue could die—because of an order Steve gave, he could be taking Valeria and Franklin's mother away from them, forever. Steve swallowed thickly, Adam's apple bobbing as he tried to work out an appropriately weighty response.

Tony's hand slapped down on his shoulder, forestalling any further self-doubts. For the moment at least.

“Enough pleasantries,” he told the group. “We've got a war to plan. Jennifer? Keep anyone else out unless we ask for them.”

Jennifer mock-saluted before strolling back outside.

Tony looked over to Steve and then nodded at the display table in the center of the room. “Well?”

Steve rubbed the back of his neck. Right. They expected _him_ to do this. He was the reason everyone was here in the first place. With steps that hopefully looked more sure than they felt, Steve strode over to the table and examined it carefully. On it, the field was laid out, them on the right side, New Versailles' walls raised up somewhere closer to the middle of the table, and the city behind them sprawling out to the left. The plans for New Versailles were amorphous in some parts, just vague swirls of where a street, business, or home might be.

After taking a moment to absorb the basics of what was laid out, Steve nodded. “Alright, first thing's first: we need to gather up all our intelligence. There's a few tiers to this: infrastructure of New Versailles, the technology we've got versus what they've got, population demographics...” Steve trailed off, chewing his lip as he thought. He glanced up at Sam. “You wouldn't happen to have saved the USB I got from the Three Fates?”

It had been a long shot, but Sam was grinning nonetheless. “Just so happens I did. Pretty quick thinking, right?” He tapped at the display, areas of New Versailles glowing faintly yellow. “I already plugged it in when Rhodey and I were waiting on you two slow pokes.”

Steve frowned. “We had to travel wide, to check some of Tony's more obscure surpluses.”

From leaning up against a tentpole over to the side, Rhodey crossed his arms and rolled his eyes. “ _Sure_ , that's all you two did. With a whole week alone on the open road.”

Tony was grinning shamelessly, even though _nothing of the sort_ had happened. Steve frowned sternly at the group as a whole, who was displeased to see were all snickering like they were in on the joke. Too bad being a beloved champion of the people didn't stop your friends from ribbing you.

“On topic,” Steve growled, “this is all the information on the infrastructure of New Versailles that the Fates gave me?” Steve asked.

Sam nodded. “Yeah. You and I have gone over most of it before: they have sewers and roads in and out of the place, but both road and sewer have the mist on them. The two train lines in past through the mists, too, but as far as we can tell the compartments are air-tight enough to remain protected for the couple seconds it takes to pass through.”

Leaning over the table, Steve watched as different lines of transit on the map glowed brighter while Sam talked about them, then faded as he moved onto the next. He nodded, hand on his chin as he considered all of this.

“What defenses do they have besides the mist?” Steve asked.

“Well, each of the four roads that lead into the city are security checkpoints. A dozen sentinels at all times stand outside each gate. No one goes in or out unless they belong. Along the wall, another two hundred sentinels patrol the perimeter. Those are the ones that are called on when they need to send someone to a ghetto,” Sam explained.

“We'll have to draw as many of those away as possible,” Steve observed.

At that, Rhodey stepped forward and waggled a phone at Steve. “I've been in contact with Luke, Jessica, and Danny. They're staying in their ghetto with the baby.”

Steve nodded. “Of course. I couldn't ask them to leave her-”

But Rhodey was shaking his head. “Not what I meant. They said they want to bring the fighting to them. Not to their _home_ , but to the ghettos. Make New Versailles fight a war on two fronts. Make them fight it on a _hundred_ fronts, if you can motivate enough people still at home to rise up.”

Steve frowned down at the digital display, eyes focused on the hundred sentinels thickly guarding the perimeter. Drawing any portion of the sentinels away would be a great boon to their attack on the city. If enough ghettos rose up, they could very well draw _all_ , or nearly all, of the sentinels away from the city.

But to ask people to do what Luke's family was doing would be to ask them to bring the fight to their homes, to their elderly, infirm, and children. Those who were willing and able to fight were already here with him for the most part. And Steve already felt uncomfortable asking even them to go to war for him.

“If the people want to draw the sentinels off our backs, it would reduce our preliminary casualties immensely,” Steve said slowly. “The more people we keep alive at first, the more insurance we'll have against the unknown defenses we're sure to run into inside the city walls. But I won't condemn people to death or homelessness who didn't agree to this fight. We're not conscripting people to service—we're fighting for freedom. We can't sacrifice choice to win it.”

“But, Steve, be practical-” Tony started.

Steve held up a hand. Tony fell silent. Blinking, Steve quickly shut down his surprise. He wished he'd known he could do that earlier.

“Those who want to help in the ghettos, who are willing to bring the sentinels down onto them, will do so outside the ghetto limits. Away from homes and businesses. Hopefully that'll minimize the collateral damage.”

“How're you going to get the sentinels to go there, then?” Clint asked. He had found himself a perch on top of a stack of munitions in the corner, and was peering down at the room with his glowing eyes. “I mean, if people are rising up in the ghettos, sentinels go out to put them down. But if a bunch of people show up in a field in bum-fuck nowhere, why would they send sentinels out? They'll _know_ it's a distraction.”

“Because they'll be breaking the law,” Steve explained. “The people in the ghettos who want to help by drawing the sentinels away will be performing prosthetic augmentations. Everyone who wants to can come to the points set up outside the ghettos and get whatever prosthetics they can cook up, or enhancements to the prosthetics they already have.”

“It'll look like you're building an army,” Rhodey finished for Steve, nodding thoughtfully.

Steve turned to him and shrugged. “The army's already there. That's just outfitting them, at that point. But you're right: hopefully it'll look threatening enough to New Versailles that they'll have to send out some sentinels, to cut off our 'reinforcements' at the source. The more ghettos we can set up these prosthetic labs at, the more people we can have gather at those points, the more of a threat they'll seem to New Versailles, and the more sentinels they'll have to send out.”

“I'll tell Luke and the others,” Rhodey volunteered, already bringing his phone up to his ear. Steve thanked him and turned to Sam.

“Can you record a message and broadcast it to... everyone? To spread the word?”

Sam smirked. “Already did the recording part. I can send out this conversation right now if you want.”

“Hold off,” Steve told him. “We don't have much surprise on our side, since I imagine New Versailles has noticed the army parked outside its walls. We have to preserve what little secrecy we have. Broadcast the message this evening, around dinnertime. We want everyone to gather tomorrow morning, an hour before dawn, so it'll give us an hour leeway to draw the sentinels away before our attack on New Versailles itself. That should give everyone just enough time to get ready.”

Sam nodded his understanding. Steve turned back to the display table, scanning it carefully.

That would take care of the sentinels—a few of them, at least. The next problem they'd have to overcome before they even considered the different points of entry would be the poisonous mist surrounding the city. Steve was certain they didn't have enough gas masks between them, even _with_ Tony's impressive supply of arms and supplies that they'd managed to scrounge up, to outfit all five thousand people. Not to mention the problem of all electronic communication going down once they were inside it.

“I think I can get past the mists.” Tony had raised his hand, almost shyly. When the room remained silent, Tony glanced around at the others who were all staring at him. He shrugged. “What? I've been working on that since I was five.”

Steve raise his eyebrows, which prompted Tony to explain: “I wanted to get out. Explore, you know. Go on adventures or something. See what was out there. So I started trying to figure out a way around them.”

“Is that how you got out?” Rhodey asked. Steve glanced over at him. He would have figured Rhodey, of all people, would know the missing pieces of the story Steve had only started to hear.

But Tony was shaking his head. “Slipped out on the train. Like you said: the compartments are mostly airtight and it only spends a second going through in the first place.”

“But you think you know how to get us past the mist?” Steve prompted.

Tony shook his head. “Not 'get us past it'. Neutralize it. I'm pretty sure the mist is actually a sophisticated nanoswarm. Kind of like Sam's Redwing, but instead of the swarm acting as eyes-and-ears, _this_ swarm is able to recombine itself on the molecular level so it can act as mustard gas, as acid, as a near-field electronics disrupter... as anything New Versailles _wants_ it to act like.”

“So how does that help us?” Steve asked. At this point, everything just sounded _worse_ , rather than better. But Tony seemed pleased with his knowledge, which meant he had already figured out the solution.

“Well, before you thought it was a mist, right? Which means shit for getting through it. Short of pointing a city-sized fan at the thing, we'd be able to do jack-all about it. But, if it's a nanoswarm, then I can kill it just like I can any technology. With an EMP.”

“That will work?” Natasha asked, watching Tony with careful eyes.

Tony shrugged. “If it's a swarm of nanbots, absolutely. If it's an actual mist, no. But we'll know if it worked or not: the whole thing should drop like a sack of flour the second I nail it with an EMP. If it doesn't drop, it's not a nanoswarm, and we'll have to figure something else out.”

“Is there a way to test this out beforehand?” Steve had to ask, even though he already figured the answer.

Sure enough, Tony shook his head. “I can't exactly walk up to the wall, scoop up some mist in a jar, and then blast it with a little baby EMP. Not before tomorrow, at any rate.”

“How sure are you that it's a nanoswarm and not a mist?” Steve asked.

Tony shrugged. “Ninety-eight percent. There's the fact that not a single poison or acid could possibly cause the injuries and deaths it causes. Then there's the disruption field that it generates. Not to mention the fact that it's never affected by weather patterns. Hot days don't burn it off, strong breezes don't push it away, it never disperses and never has to regenerate itself. The only reason I haven't done anything about it before now is because there was nothing to do. Even if I got past it, I couldn't take on New Versailles myself. And I sure as hell didn't want to get past the mist just to plant a bomb or something. There's enough tech in there for me to spend the rest of my days a very happy kid in a candy store. I need that shit intact.”

“How're you going to build an EMP?” Clint asked.

Lazily Tony chucked a pen at the stack of junk Clint was perched on top of. Clint twitched, like he expected it all to come crashing down, then relaxed when the pile remained structurally sound. He glared at Tony.

“With that junk you're sitting on there, smart-guy. Why? You wanna build it?”

Clint rolled his eyes, little mechanical whirrs of the prosthetics audible in the relative quiet of the tent.

“Once we take down the mist, we still have to get inside the city,” Steve observed, steering the conversation away from a pissing contest between Tony and Clint. “We have at least three different kinds of entry points: sewers, roads, and the train. All of them are bottle-necks. Any ideas?”

Sam stepped forward, pressing his fingers against the display and tapping for a moment before a list came up. “While we were waiting for you two lovebirds to show up, Rhodey and I did a little intelligence-gathering of our own. Out of the five thousand people we've got here, a solid two hundred of them have flying prosthetics or vehicles they brought with them that can fly.”

Steve blinked. Holy shit.

“Holy shit,” Tony said aloud. “We can launch an aerial assault.”

Steve nodded his agreement. “Sam, I'm putting you in charge of coordinating that. Out of all of us here, you can use your Redwing network to have the best perspective for an aerial assault.” Sam nodded.

“What else?” Steve asked the room at large. “Any other ways we can get around the bottleneck?”

Casually, Rhodey stepped forward and pointed at the map of New Versailles. “Well. We could take down the walls. We've got the heavy artillery to at least give it a try.”

Steve frowned. “How heavy are we talking about, here?”

But Tony was moving forward eagerly, eyes twinkling as he tried to get a good beat on Rhodey. “Are we talking...”

Rhodey grinned over at Tony. “The War Machine? Yeah. New Versailles didn't get it. It's all here.”

Tony whooped and pumped his fists. He turned to Steve. “When it comes to artillery, we've got enough to take down the walls. Trust me.”

Steve nodded. When it came to arms, there was no one better to trust than Tony Stark. So he'd trust him.

Johnny raised his hand high into the air, flames licking his fingers as he waved it around. “I can do that, too!” he pointed out. “Take down walls. Fire is pretty good at that. Especially concentrated fireballs lobbed a hundred miles an hour at walls, which yes, I can totally do.”

Steve nodded. “You need to keep the fire outside the city, though. Contained. We don't want the whole thing to burn down. You think you can do that?”

Johnny snorted. “I _know_ I can do that.”

“Alright. So the mist comes down, then Sam, and Rhodey and Johnny lead aerial and artillery assaults on the city, respectively. If the walls come down, we can get some volume of boots on the ground inside the city. In the meantime, we need to be pumping people in as best we can through some of these bottlenecks, too.”

Natasha stalked over to the display table, fingernails drumming measuredly on the edge of the table as she looked over the blueprints of the city. After a moment she looked to Clint, who was watching her from up high. The shared some sort of silent conversation before Natasha reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a USB. She plugged it into the side of the table and a whole new grid lit up, inside New Versailles.

“There's a secondary sewer system, we think,” Natasha explained. “Bobbi and I found it with Daisy. She had the idea to run seismic tests in the no-man's land around the city. This is what we found, after Daisy turned the raw data over to Bobbi and she translated it into something comprehensible.”

Steve studied the lines that Natasha's USB had overlaid on top of their map of New Versailles. Some of them were the same sewer lines they already knew, but some of them weren't. Steve traced a couple of them with his eyes, charting them as they spread out from the city like silk lines of a spider's web. A few of them ran directly under their current encampment.

“Try it,” Steve gave the order. “You and this... Daisy?”

“Daisy Johnson,” Natasha confirmed.

“You and Ms. Johnson. You think you can get into these sewers from here and take them all the way under the walls?”

Natasha nodded curtly. “As certain as I can be before we try.”

“Then do it. You and Daisy, gather up anyone you can while staying small enough to sneak in. I want anyone who's good at sabotage with the two of you. We're going to rely on you to bring down the doors from the inside, if Rhodey and Johnny can't brute force their way in. People with disruption prosthetics, stunners, influence, that sort of thing. Understood?”

“Clear,” Natasha confirmed.

Steve pointed up at Clint. “Meanwhile, you and Bobbi are going to lead my boots on the ground. Whether it's razing the walls to the ground by turning them to dust, or by Natasha and Daisy unlocking the doors for us from the inside, our main push of people is going to be on an invading force. You two are gonna lead them. You've got your eyes so you can see what's coming, make the right calls, and watch the troops. Not to mention you're a good shot yourself. Bobbi's got a bigger network than any of aside from Tony, and knows who's who.”

“Plus she's fucking killer with that staff of hers,” Clint pointed out. When Steve frowned to convey his ignorance, Clint flipped his hands around in front of him, imitating twirling a staff. “Electric murder-stick. Some sort of nuts tech, can expand and contract _way_ more than it should. Dunno how it even works, but she sure does work it.”

Steve nodded. “Good. Even better.”

“What about the train?” Sue asked. She was peering down at the map, sharp eyes tracing all the different lines into the city. She glanced up at Steve, hair falling back over her shoulder as she moved.

“That'll be you,” Steve told her. “You're gonna ride in there with as many people as you can make invisible, and as many people have prosthetics like yours that make them undetectable, or near to it. You guys can go in even if we can't bring down the mist. If Tony's wrong and it's not a nanoswarm, you can go in, move around New Versailles undetected, and figure out a way to bring it down from inside. Like Tony said, that's not a normal mist. They have a way to control it. You'd need to find that control and bring it down, as well as any controls you can get to for the gates into the city. Gather up anyone undetectable, and as many expert technicians as you think you and the other undetectables can keep out of sight. Keep the group down to fifty, at most. We can't risk getting any more onto the train.”

“How _will_ we get onto the train?” Sue asked.

Steve nodded over at Tony. “When you blast the mist with the EMP, will it stop the train?”

Tony blinked, like he hadn't thought of that. “Oh. Yeah. It should. But only for a minute. I'm sure they have back-up generators for the train. It'll get disrupted only for the amount of time it takes for those to go online. One minute, two at most.”

Steve nodded over at Sue. “That'll be your opportunity to get yourself and your people on board. Sam, you'll keep eyes on the trains tomorrow morning. When the first one comes in, you'll tell Tony to hit it. He'll hit the mist with the EMP just as the train is pulling up. Two birds, one stone.”

“One EMP,” Tony corrected with a grin.

“One of these ways is going to get us in,” Steve said. Pressing his hands to the side of the table, Steve leaned forward and examined the display. Some sentinels would be gone in the morning, before they launched their attack, thanks to the efforts of Luke, Jessica, Danny, and others like them in the ghettos. Then they would try and take down the mist first. If that didn't work, they could still get people inside on the trains with Sue. If it worked, they would pound the walls down with Johnny and Rhodey. If they couldn't bring the walls down, Natasha and Daisy could get their group in through the sewers, and Sam could get a group in through the skies. Over and under the walls. If the walls or gates did come down, Clint and Bobbi could bring everyone else in, over the rubble, and take the city. This could work.

Steve paced over to the entrance up the tent. Lifting the flap, he peered past Jennifer to the camp at large, illuminated by the waning afternoon light. Men and women moved in front of him, wrapped up in the business of living even here, at the front of a war for them. A women rushed towards a man, some sort of happy reunion of friends or siblings, hugging and laughing joyfully. A girl no older than fifteen threw a jumble of wires and screens at two boys, chattering excitedly about the device. These were the men and women, boys and girls, that Steve was expected to led into a battle he had no certitude of winning. These were the people ready to lay their lives down when raised the call.

“Sam.” Steve let the tent flap fall as he turned back to the tent at large. “Spread the word: 'tomorrow.'”

Sam waited a beat, then raised his eyebrows. “That's it?” he asked.

Steve nodded. “You eight are my generals. You know the plan. Tomorrow morning, before dawn, you gather who you need to you. Rhodey and Johnny want to get people with heavy artillery. Sue has the spies, the quiet ones, people who can reach unseen places no others can. Bobbi and Clint have foot soldiers. Natasha, saboteurs. Sam is in charge of our aerial assault.”

Steve leveled the room with a look, waiting for each man and woman to give him a nod of understanding. After a brief pause, he let his eyes land on Tony, who was smiling curiously at him from off to the side.

“Can't help notice you left me out of your list,” Tony pointed out.

Steve looked very seriously at Tony. “You? You're with me.”

* * *

The sky was dark and the half-moon high by the time Steve stepped back into the tent that evening. He wanted to double-check the lines one more time, make sure he knew where all the sewers were that Natasha and Daisy would be in. That way he could direct Johnny and Rhodey's artillery away from there and towards unoccupied tunnels beneath the walls that might be strategic weak points. He'd studied the map relentlessly that day, the whole thing committed to memory hours ago. He just wanted to be sure, to check it one more time.

A clattering of metal over metal alerted Steve to the fact that he wasn't alone. Jerking his head up, his expression softened into a smile when he realized it was Tony, lugging an unwieldy looking device onto a trolley.

“I suppose that's the EMP?” Steve asked. Tony stumbled, device slipping from his grip. Rushing forward, Steve grabbed hold of the mess of metal and wires, pushing it securely onto the trolley for Tony. Tony smiled and wiped a dirty hand across his forehead, which was already well-marked with grease.

“Yeah, sorry, yeah. EMP, ready to go.”

“Have you tested it?”

Tony snorted. “Uh, yeah, you don't have a great understanding as to how EMPs work, do you?”

Steve crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows, leveling Tony with his best fearless-leader, I-am-not-amused glare. It hardly worked.

“Can't test it. It's a one-off,” Tony explained. “But it works, don't worry. I've built these before. Not that hard. Not compared to some of the other stuff I've cobbled together over the years.” Tony's grease-stained fingers drummed tellingly over the center of his chest, the blue glow of his QC clearly visible through the white undershirt he was wearing.

Steve nodded, turning away from Tony and back to the display. “Okay. I trust you.” His eyes scanned the display again, for the thousandth time, tracing path after path after path into New Versailles.

“Hey.” Tony was at his side, smiling tentatively over at Steve. “You alright?”

“Sure,” Steve shrugged. “Just. Making sure I've got it all.”

Tony's arm nudged Steve's gently, his hand coming to rest alongside Steve's on the table's edge. Steve could feel the warmth coming off him.

“Didn't mean that. I meant... this is pretty big. How are you holding up?”

Steve shook his head. “I'm still standing. I'll be out there tomorrow, ready to give the... the orders.” His throat locked a little on that. He cleared it before he could keep going. “That's enough, isn't it?”

Tony's hand moved a couple inches to slip over Steve's on the table.

“It's okay _not_ to be okay with this. This is... big. Bigger than either of us. Bigger than my ego, and you know what _that's_ like.”

Steve shook his head again, eyes downcast and turned away from Tony so he wouldn't have to witness his weakness.

“I don't want to ask people to die for me,” Steve whispered.

Tony's hand squeezed tight over Steve's. “You're not asking them to die for you. You're asking them to die for themselves. You're asking them to die for each _other_.”

Steve wasn't sure what to say to that—wasn't sure if he could get the words past the lump in his throat, even if he had some to say. Luckily, Tony apparently had enough to say for the both of them.

“You know, in my whole life, I don't think I've met anyone really good. You know, someone that's a saint. Yinsen was... Yinsen was great, he was kind and smart. But he was depressed. Suicidal. Not that it made him _not good_ , but. He was just a guy, who wanted to get back to his family. A guy who lost his family. He died for me, but he was ready to die. He did a good thing, but it was the easy choice for him, in the end. And he was probably one of the better men I've ever known. Rhodey's a good guy too, but he's had his moments. Moments of anger, moments of weakness. Pepper, Happy, me—fuck knows I've had my moments. We've all done things, made compromises, sacrifices. We've all been stupid teenagers and selfish adults.

“But on the other side of it, I don't know many bad people, either. Even Obadiah, I... fuck, I don't know. I keep thinking there's something _more_ to it, something motivating him besides just keeping us down. I know it sounds like you, sounds idealistic and dumb, but no one could be that bad, right? No one could be that cruel and ignorant. Not someone I _liked_ , at least. Not someone who raised me. My dad, too: he wasn't evil incarnate. Neglectful, distracted, maybe selfish. But he did his good things, made his contributions.

“What I've found, what I think I've figured out after thirty-something years of life...” Steve shot Tony a look, and he rolled his eyes and corrected himself: “ _forty_ something years, is: people aren't good people, but they're not bad people, either. People are just people. Trying to get by, trying to survive. They're just living their lives, doing their best not to screw up too bad. Maybe it's pessimistic of me. Or maybe it's optimistic? I don't even know. The point is, if I even _have_ a point: then I met you. And you're a good person, Steve. Not just a good person: the best person I've ever known. I respect you, and I'm proud of what you've done. I know that no matter what the outcome of tomorrow is, what we're doing here was the right thing to do. Because you're a good person, Steve. And you always do the right thing.”

Steve shook his head again, unable to do anything else in response. Tears pricked at his eyes as he tried to move away from Tony, from his warmth and kindness and... whatever else there was between them.

As Steve started to move, he found himself tugged gently back, Tony's hand still firmly over his. Steve risked a glance up, eyes still blurry with tears. Tony's expression was raw, everything he was laid out and bare for Steve to see. Steve knew the sight was a privilege he earned. That thought just made him feel more overwhelmed, more unworthy of everything. Of the people out there ready to die for him, of this rebellion he was leading, of the new world that might come after. Unworthy, too, of Tony, of this arms dealer from a different world, a more elite one.

“I have to...” Steve started. He swallowed thickly, mind casting about for an excuse to be alone with his insecurities. “Get to bed. Sam and I, we've got a tent-”

“Stay with me.”

Steve's body went still, save for the goosebumps that arose suddenly all over his skin at Tony's soft words.

“I... can't...”

Tony moved forward, tugging Steve in towards him via his captured hand. Steve went, feeling inevitability pulling at him like it always did when he was around Tony.

“Stay with me, tonight,” Tony begged. “It might be our last night on earth, after all.”

Steve's nostrils flared as he breathed in Tony, standing so close to him. He could feel his heat, see every flutter of eyelash, see the flecks of gold in his big, brown eyes. Steve let out a shuddering breath. “I want to, Tony.” _God_ , did he want to.

Tony's free hand came up to rub at Steve's arm, and Steve was pretty well and truly lost at that point. Every swipe of Tony's skin over his was like trails of fire, embers igniting beneath his palm.

“Then stay,” Tony told him. “For once in your life, Rogers, take something you want for _you_.”

There was nothing to say against that—no argument that Steve could think of, or _wanted_ to think of, at least. So Steve bent his head, brushed his lips against Tony's, and _took_.

They ended up falling against the table display, making the image flicker in a burst of angry static. Tony laughed into Steve's mouth, and Steve rolled his eyes, hands somehow already bracketing Tony's hips against the table.

“Maybe we should move this to my bed?” Tony suggested with his trademark leer. Except it was more subdued, more uncertain, than those times Steve had been privy to it before. It made it wholly more endearing. Steve pressed a kiss against Tony's lips just so he could taste that nervous leer, pulling away before Tony shoved his tongue at Steve and they both got distracted again.

“Sure,” Steve agreed. He let himself be dragged over to Tony's “room”: a corner of the main tent that had been sectioned off with some ratty sheets and plastic tarp, whatever they could scrounge up amidst the makeshift town they had sprung up here. Tony took two seconds to kick his shoes off, and then he was on Steve again, dragging him down with him to his bedroll.

Steve shoved Tony down maybe too roughly, but Tony just laughed and grabbed the back of Steve's neck, tongue lapping at the inside of Steve's mouth. Steve groaned and sucked on Tony's lips, bodies slowly falling against each other as they sunk to the floor together.

Tony broke the kiss long enough to point out: “Er, I guess I should have invited you back to my 'sleeping bag' instead of my 'bed'.”

“Stop being a smart ass,” Steve chided. He kissed Tony again, and again, because _wow_ , he got to keep kissing Tony, he didn't have to stop.

“Pedantic,” Tony mumbled just as Steve was wondering if he needed to shift his weight off of him a bit.

Steve drew back, frowning down at Tony. “What?”

Tony's lips were spit-slick and kiss-swollen, and of course they were curling into a smart ass little grin. “Pedantic. Being overly precise with minor details. I wasn't being a smart ass. I was being pedantic.”

“This is ridiculous,” Steve grumbled good-naturedly as he lowered himself on top of Tony again. Swiping Tony's hair back from his forehead with both hands, Steve kissed Tony three times in quick succession. “You,” kiss, “are,” kiss, “such a _smart ass_ ,” kiss kiss _kiss_. Tony laughed and beat futilely at Steve's shoulders. Steve was able to easily hold Tony down with thighs and hands as he kissed the laughter right out of him.

“ _You_ are,” Tony grumbled.

“Worst come back ever,” Steve teased.

Steve kissed Tony again, even though his lips were stretched too wide in a smile for him to do the job properly. Tony didn't seem to mind, shoving his tongue enthusiastically past Steve's teeth as he clung to Steve.

“You should get naked,” Tony told Steve during one breathless break from kissing.

“You are so smooth,” Steve laughed. But leaned back to tug off his grey-blue shirt and unbutton his cargo pants. Tony wriggled out from under Steve far enough so that he could yank off his dirty tank top, though his hips and thighs remained trapped too securely beneath Steve's to make any progress on his pants.

As Steve lifted his hips to start shimmying out of his pants, Tony leaned back on his elbows and nodded at him. “Line worked, didn't it?” he pointed out.

Steve rolled his eyes as he kicked his pants off and settled back down on top of Tony. “Who says it was the line? I thought you knew I was just in this for your pretty face.”

Tony seemed like he wanted to reply to that, but his gaze was too busy trained on Steve's hips, or rather, _just_ below his hips. Steve glanced down and flushed, looking back up quickly.

“Uh... It's not... a... problem?” he asked.

“What's a word that means the opposite of a problem?” Tony mumbled, as if in a daze.

“A solution?” Steve suggested.

Tony nodded. “That dick is a solution. The best solution. The solution to the problem in my pants.”

Steve flushed and shoved at him. “Maybe you should finish getting naked first,” he suggested.

Distractedly Tony lifted his hips and batted at his jeans, so ineffectually that eventually Steve just sighed and bent down to do the job himself.

While Steve was busy actually moving them forward, Tony seemed content to nibble at Steve's shoulder and reach between them to fondle at Steve's dick. It didn't make pulling Tony's pants off any easier.

“Finally,” Steve sighed, as Tony kicked his jeans the last of the way off. Then it was _Steve's_ turn to be distracted by _Tony's_ naked body, because, well. Steve supposed you couldn't get the reputation of a playboy if you were too unfortunate-looking. But Tony's body really was a sight to see. Lean muscles lay trim and tight beneath olive-colored skin. His torso was bare of hair, except for a dark line starting beneath his belly button and leading down to the neatly-trimmed thatch above his groin. His erection itself was as attractive as the rest of him: good length and thickness, circumcised, nice thick vein curling around the underside. Steve reached forward with one hand and rolled it between his fingers, getting a feel for the heft of it.

“You know, we never negotiated this, but I'd really like to fuck you,” Tony mentioned casually.

Steve raised an eyebrow up at Tony, but he had no poker face, he knew. He leaned forward and kissed Tony while keeping a hand between them to stroke lightly at Tony's erection. “I'm actually pretty happy with that,” Steve told him.

“But I don't have any lube on me,” Tony grumbled, glancing forlornly around the tent like his eyes might land on some, carelessly left there by someone else.

Steve rolled his eyes and kissed Tony again. It was a good thing they waited until now to do this: Steve was pretty sure he wouldn't have been able to do anything _but_ kiss Tony for the last few months if he had started this earlier. “I think we'll manage,” Steve mumbled into his mouth.

Tony pulled back, frowning. “No, Steve, I don't think... I can't just shove it in, and we're not using spit, because that's not going to be enough lubrication...”

Steve started laughing, and found he couldn't stop. He had to roll off top of Tony just so he could catch his breath. Tony was pouting mightily at him, which just made Steve laugh _more_ , because really: a naked Tony Stark was pouting at him.

“Tony, I know how sex works,” Steve told him, once he'd caught his breath. Tony opened his mouth to protest and Steve cut him off. “Even anal sex. Trust me. I have an understanding of the process.”

Tony's eyes narrowed a little bit and he seemed like he was about to ask “who”, so Steve kept going. Tony did _not_ get to ask that when it was well-known he slept around like motel on wheels.

“I figured we'd do something else tonight, all things considered. Like, maybe...” Steve moved forward to drape himself over Tony, looking down at him through his eyelashes. Carefully Steve lined themselves up until Tony's erection was pressing behind him, warm and smearing sticky precome onto his skin between his ass cheeks. Tony gasped slightly, a light of understanding going off behind his eyes. Steve grinned and leaned down to kiss him again. For a smart guy, Tony could be pretty stupid, sometimes.

Tony thrust gently up between Steve's cheeks, gazing up at him with parted lips. “Oh,” he breathed. “That works.”

Steve grinned and cupped Tony's face in his hands. “I'm told I'm pretty handy with creative solutions,” he pointed out before he kissed him. He pulled away with a laugh as Tony tried to increase his pace but only succeeded in squishing his dick awkwardly. “Come here,” Steve told him, sliding off Tony and onto his side. Tony followed suit, settling in behind Steve and lining them up again.

Steve let himself shift backwards and forwards, slowly coordinating his movements with Tony's. His breath hitched as they found a rhythm, Tony's erection sliding smoothly between his thighs, head of it bumping up against his balls and the base of his dick. Tony's arm came around Steve, hand drifting towards his groin but not making any contact with intent. He was just holding Steve in place, hugging his chest and Steve's back close together. Steve gasped and reached down to curl his fingers around Tony's forearm, anchoring himself to Tony the way Tony was anchoring himself to Steve.

Tony's face nuzzled against Steve's neck, kissing and nibbling it lightly. “You feel great,” he murmured.

Steve arched his neck and leaned back to steal a kiss. His eyes fluttered closed as he focused on the sensation of Tony's erection sliding between his thighs, rubbing against his balls and base of his groin teasingly. Reaching down between his thighs with his free hand, Steve rubbed the heel of his palm against his erection, just to relieve some of the pressure.

“Hey, no.” Tony batted his hand away and replaced it with his own, finally touching Steve with purpose. Steve groaned and nuzzled his cheek against Tony's thankfully. His hand was firm on Steve, stroking him smoothly, its movements eased by Steve's own precome, spurting out of him at Tony's slightest touch. Steve's hips twitched, stuttering their smooth movements as Tony's thumb moved to flick over the head of Steve's erection, pressing gently against the slit with its edge.

Tony's hips were moving faster against his, his hand stuttering just a little as he tried to keep pace. Steve wrapped a guiding hand over Tony's and they stroked him together. Tony was panting lightly against Steve's neck, teeth grazing every once in a while as he moved. His movement between Steve's thighs was growing slicker with their sweat and precome, making Steve's nerves light up more and more with pleasure as Tony thrust against him.

Tony came with a groan too soon, a mumbled litany of “shit shit shit shit” breathed into Steve's neck. Steve laughed and kept stroking himself, fully intent on following Tony over the edge sooner rather than later. Tony's hand had dropped away as he came, but now he brought it back up to bat at Steve's. For a moment Steve waited patiently, erection bobbing in the cool air of the tent, wanting for a hand to finish it off.

“How you doing?” Tony asked him, after catching his breath.

“Close,” Steve promised him. “Let me just-” he moved his hand back between his thighs, but once again Tony stopped him.

“Hang on, hang on. I can't have you spreading it around that I'm a selfish lover,” Tony explained as he climbed gracelessly between Steve's legs. “What would that do for my reputation?”

Steve raised an eyebrow down at Tony. “Are you planning on making good use of _that_ aspect of your reputation in the near future.”

With a wink and a leer up at Steve, Tony promised: “Only for you.” Then he dipped his head and took Steve into his mouth. Steve arched gently up, letting out a single long breath as he fought not to thrust up into Tony's warm mouth. Tony seemed disinclined to go slow, pulling out all the stops to drive Steve over the edge. He rolled the base of Steve's erection between sure hands, lapped long stripes up the underside of his erection, and sucked precome out of the head like it was his very favorite treat. It was all Steve could do to bury both hands in Tony's hair and hang on.

When Steve finally found his release at Tony's hands, it was with a low groan and a long sigh that he spilt it into Tony's mouth. Tony popped up, pleased smile on his face as he licked his lips like a cat that got the cream. His hair was even more wild than usual, sticking up every which way thanks to Steve burying his fingers in it. Steve laughed through panting breaths and reached up to pull Tony to his chest, smoothing down that hair as his heartbeat slowly returned to normal.

Steve was starting to drift off when he finally managed to rouse himself to action. Gently sliding Tony off his chest, Steve stood up and started collecting his pants and shirt. A hand on his ankle stopped him.

“Where do you think you're going?” Tony mumbled sleepily.

Steve threw a thumb over his shoulder. “Sam's got a bedroll for me-”

“Bullshit. Down. Here. Bedroll. Roll in the bed. Et cetera,” Tony yawned.

Steve hesitated, pants clutched loosely to his groin. He glanced back at the curtain separating Tony's “room” from the rest of the tent, wondering if he'd be missed if he didn't find the bedroll Sam laid out for him. Tony tugging at his ankle and mewling pathetically made the decision for him. Steve huffed a long-suffering sigh and dropped his pants before laying back down with Tony on his sleeping bag. Tony snuffled his nose against Steve's throat happily, sticking his limbs to Steve like an octopus. Within a second Steve was well and truly stuck. He smiled to himself and shut his eyes. It was an okay place to be stuck.

Just when Steve thought Tony had drifted off, he shifted against Steve's side and sat up a little bit. “Oh, sorry. Pass me my shirt.”

Steve frowned but sat up, rummaging around for Tony's shirt. “Are you cold?” he asked. Tony certainly didn't feel cold. Between then, they were generating enough body heat to warm up Tony's section of tent.

Tony shook his head as Steve looked, propping himself up on his elbows. “No, it's the... the QC.” Tony's fingerpads drummed against his chest, over the blue glow there. “Don't want to keep you up.”

Steve turned back to Tony, expression softening. “Oh, Tony. It... It won't. I'm fine with it if you are.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “What, really? It's not weirding you out that my chest is glowing blue?”

Steve snorted and laid back down beside Tony, quest for his shirt abandoned. “Of course not. It's... comforting, in a way.” Steve pressed a kiss to the center of Tony's chest, directly on top of the spot that glowed the brightest.

“'Comforting'?” Tony asked.

Steve nodded, laying his head down on Tony's chest. “Sure. Because you said it's your back-up, right? It's you in there. The glowing reminds me that you're safe, no matter what. In some way.”

Tony laughed. “Right. I'm safe because I'm saved.”

 _Save us, Steve Rogers_!

Frowning to himself at the intrusive thought, Steve asked Tony: “Hey. Remember back when you took me to visit the Three Fates?” Tony _mhmmed_ sleepily. “What did Pietro say to you? At the end. You seemed pretty shaken up over it.”

Tony shifted, prompting Steve to lift his head so he could look Tony in the eye. Tony was peering down at Steve curiously, something like... awe, or wonder, or some emotion too big and too much for Steve to possibly be worthy of.

“He said this,” Tony explained. He gestured with one hand around the tent, the other wrapped firmly around Steve's back. “He said this would happen. That you'd bring down the walls of New Versailles. And I'd get you here.”

Steve breathed slowly, lying himself back down against Tony's shoulder. Tony held him tight, and Steve held him back. Through all this craziness, Tony was his anchor. Tony would keep Steve's feet on the ground, and head above the mist.

 


	11. Follow Me

Steve awoke too early the next morning—the watch on Tony's wrist told him it was only four am as of yet. The ghettos wouldn't be starting their branch of the revolt until five, and then their front would wait until dawn at six am. Give news time to reach New Versailles of the ghettos revolting and for them to send the sentinels away.

Still, Steve's eyes opened in the darkness with the sort of absoluteness that told him he'd be getting no more sleep tonight, no matter how long he lay beside Tony, staring at the canvas ceiling. So instead of fruitlessly closing his eyes and tossing and turning until he awakened his bed partner, Steve gathered up his clothes and got dressed, slipping out into the chilly dawn. He tugged on his cap as he left the tent, then shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets. It wasn't that it was especially cold out—the morning chill in the air was just that, a morning chill—but rather there was a sense of cold stillness over everything. A world holding her breath.

Steve took a walk through the shanty town the people had created in a week outside New Versailles' borders, sight sliding over smoldering fires, ears picking up low snores from inside people's tents or cars, nose sniffing out the scent of old dinner or early breakfast. When he reached the edge of the camp he stopped, gaze cast up at the clouded city before him.

Steve wasn't sure how long his stroll lasted or how long he stood on the outskirts of the camp, watching New Versailles for any sign of life when Sam walked up beside him. Probably a half hour, maybe forty-five minutes. Regardless of the time elapsed, Sam settled in beside him.

“Good night sleep?”

Steve shrugged, blinking a little to get rid of the last blurriness in front of his eyes. “About as good as you would expect,” he replied absently. His eyes were still scanning the mists before him, and the high walls behind that, his mind far afield on the thousand and one actions he needed to coordinate today.

A cool finger came up to tap meaningfully at his throat, startling Steve out of his melancholy thoughts. Sam was looking at him expectantly. “Right. And I don't suppose it was interrupted by this leech that seems to have stuck itself to your neck.”

It took Steve's half-awake mind a minute to parse what Sam was saying. When it did, Steve flushed hotly and slapped a hand up to his neck, covering what he could only presume was a sizable hickey. _Tony_. 

“I must have... slept... on a... something.” Steve started, stumbling over his own words. He bit his tongue and cursed himself for being such a terrible liar.

Sam just rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, stop straining yourself, oh Captain my Captain. Not like we all don't already know.”

Steve wanted to point out that last night was the  _first time_ , that they had all been presuming the wrong thing for months now, but he swallowed his protest. Now wasn't the time, and if he told Sam that last night something new and special occurred, he'd probably want to talk about it. It was all the last things Steve needed to be focusing on right now.

Which was when Tony strolled up behind the two of them and smacked Steve straight on the ass. The sigh that followed from Steve was the same long-suffering noise he had heard Rhodey and Pepper make on multiple occasions. It was the sigh of someone trapped deep in Tony Stark's inner circle with no way out.

“How're things going out here?” Tony asked. “Mist still misty? Walls still wally?”

“Not for much longer,” Steve prayed. He glanced sidelong at Tony, who was busy grinning _way_ too big at Steve's neck. “Your EMP ready?”

“Locked and loaded,” Tony promised with a salute.

Steve nodded and fell silent at he turned to look at New Versailles again. The quiet before the storm, his mother said to him when he was a boy.

“What's going on in the ghettos?” Steve asked Sam after a minute.

Sam cocked his head to the side, eyes unfocused as he listened to Redwing. His headscarf was long since abandoned. No reason to hide the implants now, or ever again.

“The people are waking up.”

Steve nodded. Almost time. Straightening his back to steel, Steve pressed a hand down on Sam's shoulder and turned away. “Keep an eye on them. Tony: with me.”

Tony followed obediently as Steve led him through the camp, back to their tent. Tony perked up as they ducked into the tent together, but Steve was all business. He had to be, today: this war was bigger than the both of them, no matter how big Tony's ego _told_ him he was. Steve made straight for Tony's EMP, still on the trolley they had hauled it onto last night. Steve placed a hand on it and turned to Tony.

“Get this down to the west bank,” he told Tony. “Wait for Sam's signal. He'll tell you when.”

Tony nodded, but rather than getting a move on, he slinked closer to Steve. His hand came out to rest on top of Steve's where it was on the EMP. “You know, we have some time-”

Steve leveled Tony with a  _look_ , which shut him up pretty quick. Didn't wipe the grin off his face, though. Steve tried to keep himself from looking just as satisfied with himself—he didn't think he succeeded. Tony had that way about him: that ability to infuriate people into liking him, in spite of themselves. Tony could talk all he want about how Steve was beloved by the people, but Tony was loved by those who knew him,  _really_ knew him. 

“Alright, fine. How about a kiss for good luck? Because I know you won't want to give me one once we're back out there.”

Steve sighed. Tony actually had a good point. Leaning forward, he pressed a reluctant kiss to Tony's lips. Which of course turned into a full-blown make-out, Steve pressed up against the EMP and Tony pretty much crawling into his lap as they kissed and touched and embraced each other, trying to drown out their wound too tight nerves with touch and taste and sound.

“Whoa, yeah. Should have knocked.”

Steve groaned and knocked his head against Tony's shoulder as Rhodey entered the tent and promptly started back out, hand over his eyes.

“We're not- Come in, Rhodey,” Steve called out. It took a second to disentangle himself from Tony, and a second longer to confirm that Tony would be staying off him for the time being. Steve tapped the EMP with his hand and nodded at Tony. He rolled his eyes, but started off with the large device, blowing Steve a kiss and a wink just before he left the tent. Steve sighed and turned back to Rhodey, who looked way too smug for a guy who'd just seen what he'd seen.

“Sam wants you,” Rhodey told him. “He thinks you'll want to see this.”

Steve followed Rhodey out of the tent, back down to the north edge of the camp. People were waking up now, on the move. Some were collecting supplies: prosthetics, weapons, tools. Some were eating breakfast, getting dressed. Some were hugging and kissing their friends, family, lovers, before going their separate ways. Steve felt a lump form in his throat and he focused on Rhodey's back in front of him, on the job at hand.

Rhodey passed Steve off to Sam before heading away, presumably to round up his troops. Sam was squatting on the ground, head tilted back as he watched the walls of New Versailles.

“They're on the move,” he told Steve. Told him needlessly, because Steve could see with his own eyes: the sentinels were leaving.

Every minute or two, a blast of red and yellow flames would appear through the mist, a great big mass of shadow above the flames rocketing away, one direction or another. Steve breathed deep and clenched his fist to his mouth. It was working. The people in the ghettos were rising up, proving to be the distraction they needed. The sentinels were leaving.

“How many so far?” Steve asked.

“Seventeen sentinels have left. Most of the ghettos we knew would be active are, save one or two. Five...” Sam hesitated, then hurried on: “five people are dead.”

Steve pressed his hands to his head, shock going through him. He knew he was supposed to expect it, knew people were going to die today. But five were dead  _already_ . Just from the distraction, before the real fighting had even started.

“Leave that number out next time,” Steve told Sam. It wasn't that he didn't want to know. He would know: it just had to be after. After the fighting was over, after Steve had done everything that needed to be done. Then he could mourn the dead, and flagellate himself for each life. But not now.

“Go get your people ready,” Steve told Sam.

“Yes, sir,” Sam replied without a trace of irony. It made Steve's blood run just a little colder.

“And make sure you've got one ear on the train,” Steve reminded him. “Tony needs to know-”

“-when it's coming through. I got it, don't micro-manage.”

Steve set his jaw and nodded, turning back to the mists as Sam walked away. Another sentinel flew off into the sky in a flash of red and gold. Steve checked his watch. Five thirty.

By six, Steve counted forty more sentinels off the walls, gone out to the ghettos. He tried not to think about the forty ghettos those sentinels landed in, the people who had drawn the machines of death to them. The army forming at his back, waiting for his signal, was helping keeping his mind focused on the task at hand.

“You on me, Sam?” Steve asked under his breath. He got an affirmative response on the phone he was holding in his hands.

“Alright, broadcast me to everyone at the camp. Over anything you can.” Steve slipped his phone into his coat pocket, then waited a beat before turning around.

The crowd roared. Steve took a step back, buffeted by the force of humanity that had gathered behind him, for him, on these muddy slopes outside the walls of their oppressors. He hadn't realized it was so many. Hadn't ever seen a crowd of five thousand, laid out in lines, split into sections, cheering, cheering, cheering for him, for each other, for their freedom.

Individual people jumped out at Steve at random. A woman in the front row, hair in dreadlocks, plasma guns charged and flashing in both hands. A stocky man with a busted nose and an exoskeleton like Jennifer's, painted a garish orange. A blonde man with longish hair, pulled back in a ponytail, fists cracking with energy. A young woman with dusky brown skin, head wrapped, hands curled tight around a massive sword that was swirling with plasma.

Steve waited for a minute, for two, waiting for the cheering to die down. When it finally reached a level where he could hear himself think, Steve raised a hand over his head. His ungloved fingers were cool in the early morning chill.

“Good morning.”

Steve flushed. Good morning? That's what he came up with? These people believed in him, were fighting for him, and he told them  _good morning_ ?

Tony's words came back at him, from the night before.  _You're not asking them to die for you. You're asking them to die for themselves. You're asking them to die for each other._

_Save us, Steve Rogers_ !

“I could give you a speech...” he tried again. “But you don't need to hear anything from me. Because I'm not the one you're here for. Every one of you men and women came out here today for yourselves. For your families. For your friends and loved ones. Some of them you brought with you. More of them you left at home, in the ghettos where New Versailles expects us to be satisfied living.

“But we are not satisfied, are we? Right now, in the ghettos that we have no choice but to call our home, our brothers, sisters, children, parents, friends, and neighbors are rising up. They are fighting for us. More importantly: they are fighting for themselves. Because they are not satisfied with living off the scraps of what New Versailles deems fit to throw at us. _You_ are not satisfied hiding on the fringe of society, covering up prosthetic enhancements you only installed to make up for the vast deficits that the greed of New Versailles left you. _I_ am not satisfied having to risk my life every day I step outside with my hands uncovered. I am not satisfied drinking powdered milk, seeing a green vegetable once every month if I'm lucky. Our children aren't satisfied learning nothing but how to scavenge, with back alleys and illegal chop-shops as their school houses.

“This morning, I call on you: the disenfranchised youth. Rise up! Rise up, and tell New Versailles this: I am not satisfied. _You_ are not satisfied. _We_ are not satisfied! Not at this meager, mean existence! Today we rise up! Today we bring our dissatisfaction to their doorstep! Today they know us!”

A cheer, like the roar of an invisible sea breaking over his head, rose up to to engulf Steve where he stood. The crowd had their fists and weapons raised into the air, had their feet stomping over the ground until the earth shook.

Steve nodded and waved his hand, gesturing forward towards himself. He told the crowd: “I need the aerial unit up front, ready to lift off.” As the crowd started to shift, Steve pulled out his phone and depressed the button on it. “Sam, ETA on the train?”

“Five minutes. Stark's in position. Countdown at one minute.”

Steve nodded. The crowd was moving, artillery front-lines breaking to make way for the aerial unit. Makeshift hovercrafts, biplanes, winged cars, and backyard helicopters all made their way to the front, one way or another. Several people who weren't the vehicles' pilots stepped forward as well, unfurling great mechanical wings or just standing quietly and waiting, with some sort of non-visible means of flight. Steve looked them over, counting quietly to himself.

He raised his voice again to address this unit. “Sam'll give us the countdown at one minute before the mists come down. The second they do, you're in the air, getting in. Be careful. The people in the ghettos have managed to draw at least half of the sentinels off the walls, but that means there's still half of them up there. Take them down if you have the means. If you don't, focus on bringing down the walls. If you're short on brute force, then get yourself beyond the walls and get to work opening the gates in the north, south, east, and west. Use your height to your advantage. Grabs-and-drops are smart. Accelerating from on high is good. Move in three dimensions, not just two. Take your cues from Sam when he gives them to you. He's got his eyes on you. And remember that we're right behind you.”

The crowd nodded grimly. Over the phone, Sam announced “Two minutes.”

Steve raised his voice to the crowd on either side of the aerial unit. “Artillery team: look to your captains, Rhodey and Johnny. We need to bring down those walls. As soon as the aerial team lifts off, you start pounding the walls, and pounding hard. Keep your eyes on the skies and avoid the aerial team as best you can: we don't need any casualties from friendly fire. Concentrate your attacks where Johnny and Rhodey tell you: they know where the weak points in the façade are. The more you work together, the faster the walls come down. Don't go off on your own. Combine the force of your blows, and that wall will come down, surely as if it was a paper house before a tsunami. Separate, and you might as well be raindrops beating against a rock. Clint and Bobbi's teams: stay back until your captains give the signal.”

“One minute.” Steve stopped talking when Sam's voice transmitted over every device with a speaker in the camp. “Fifty-five seconds.” Steve rubbed the back of his bare hands together. He had more to say, more to explain, more checks to run and plans to go over. But he couldn't. “Fifty seconds.” He just needed to trust the people, trust the men and women gathered here today. “Forty-five seconds.” Trust that they would fight. “Forty seconds.” Trust that they would win.

At twenty seconds Sam switched to counting every second out loud. The camp held its breath as his voice called out “Five, four, three, two, one, _now_.”

For a second that lasted an hour, nothing happened. Steve's heart pounded in his throat as he imagined Sue's team scrambling on board the train, hoping they were all hidden and safe.

Then, between one second and the next, the mist just... fell. Like a screen snapping off, a hologram flickering out of existence. The mist fell away, turned off, shut down. Steve stared at it with a gaping mouth. Tony was right. Tony had done it. The white walls of New Versailles were stained a vibrant red in the unfiltered morning sun.

“Aerial team, go!” Steve shouted. The sound of a hundred engines starting filled the air, prompting Steve to bring his hands up to his ears to block some of it out. He watched as the fliers took off. One boy in rattier clothes than most spread brilliant wings of the thinnest steel and silken canvas. Another girl with a jetpack strapped to her hands and feet took off shakily, but then was up and away faster than the boy. A man and woman, the first dark-haired, the second fair, fired up a clunky biplane-cum-car, whooping out loudly as the vehicle took off with a groan and charged ahead. A dark-skinned woman with a brilliant white mohawk took the skies under her own power, no visible means of propulsion other than a fierce gale whipping at her clothes sending her streaking through the air. One by one, and as a single mass at the same time, the fliers took to the sky.

“Artillery teams, go!” Steve shouted.

On Steve's right, Johnny cheered and shouted “flame on!” as he stormed forward at the front of his unit. His hands erupted into brilliant flames, engulfing his arms from the elbows down. He was lobbing balls of fire at the walls from a hundred yards out, and hitting. On Steve's left, Rhodey charged forward with two great guns strapped to his shoulders, a bandolier of weapons wrapped around his chest and waist. As he ran the two shoulder guns fired, launching two rockets at the walls. They found their mark with a crash, flame and stone and smoke spewing forth from the impact site. That must be some of Tony's War Machine.

That was when the sentinels woke up. Their glowing eyes and rocket boots weren't as eerie without the fog to distort them, but they were no less menacing. From the closest aerial vehicles, Steve could faintly pick up Sam's voice calling out warnings, patterns as he saw them, positions of the sentinels. The first one to engage his team knocked the boy with mechanical wings to the ground with a flick of its hand. Steve's knuckles cracked where they had curled into fists. The boy was up a second later, shaking his head dazedly as he took off again. But there were some the sentinel knocked down that didn't come back up.

Two aerials, the man and woman with the biplane-car, and a girl with gossamer wings that flapped so rapidly Steve's eyes couldn't pick them out in motion, teamed up on a single sentinel. From the biplane-car the young man stood up and shouted something at the hummingbird girl, then tossed a line out to her. The fair-haired woman inside kept the plane steady as it closed in on a sentinel. The two began to move in opposite directions, circling the sentinel from either side. Five rotations around it, with others keeping the sentinel's attention away from the team, and the sentinel was wrapped up tight enough that it sputtered to a confused halt on the field. After a long moment of slow struggling, the sentinel fell forward. The artillery unit was on it in an instant, blowing it to kingdom come, explosives deposited in all its vulnerable crevices.

Steve waited on the front line, palms itching for him to go out there and do something. But he didn't have heavy-impact prosthetics or weapons, and he couldn't fly. He needed to stay with the foot soldiers, with Bobbi and Clint's teams.

Five minutes into the assault, Steve spotted Tony jogging towards him from the other side of the field, a rucksack slung over his shoulder. By the time he reached Steve, Tony was panting hard. He tossed the rucksack to the ground by Steve's feet, then pressed his hands to his thighs and breathed deeply.

“It worked,” he wheezed, after a moment.

Steve nodded grimly, then reached out to place a hand on Tony's shoulder. Tony automatically reached up and covered it with his own, still bent over and catching his breath. “It worked,” Steve acknowledged. “Good job. Sue's team?”

“They're in.” Tony straightened up, hands on his lower back as he continued to breathe deeply. “Everyone got on the train. Natasha and Daisy's team are underground, west side by the train. Should be far away from all this,” he waved a hand at the mess of explosions pounding the wall and ground in front of it.

“Speaking of that, how are we doing?” Tony asked.

Steve's eyes tirelessly scanned the scene ahead of him. “I think we're getting in,” he commented. The artillery unit was still pounding relentlessly at the walls in one spot—a place where Natasha thought an old, forgotten sewer line ran beneath the wall. The hope was that the ground would give way beneath their assault, bringing the wall with it. About half the artillery was focused on the section wall, the other half on the ground just beneath it. Sewer line or no, they were certainly beginning to make a dent.

A sentinel screamed overhead, smoking and fleeing in the wake of six or so aerial units, chasing it like an army of angry archangels. The sentinel crashed to the ground in the middle of camp, punching a smoking crater into the ground. Steve and Tony both had turned to watch it, mouths falling open.

“Hope you didn't have anything you'd miss in there,” Tony commented. Steve winced when he realized the sentinel's crash site _was_ dangerously close to where they'd set up camp.

“Anything I had was yours, anyway,” Steve pointed out. He had the USB the Fates had given him tucked safely into his inside coat pocket. Other than that, there was nothing.

A cheer from the field below them drew Steve and Tony's attention back down to the battle. The ground had given way right where Natasha had said it would, and the wall was cracking viciously just above the spot. As Steve and Tony watched, the artillery teams battered it with everything they had, a conflagration of smoke and fire and rock rising like the wrath of a vengeful god. Another aerial team went after a sentinel, driving it towards the wall. The cybernetic angel boy was flying straight for the wall, the sentinel on his tail as it fled the aerial units nipping at its heels. At the last second the boy pulled up, flying straight up a hundred feet over the wall. The sentinel's agility was no match for that, and it crashed headlong into the wall. With a mighty crack the wall came down at that point, splitting in half and falling into itself. Boulders the size of cars plummeted to the ground. A slab of concrete and rebarb twisted away, crashing down inside New Versailles and crushing everything beneath it.

Steve raised his hand above his head. “Ground team, that's a go! Take the city! Take it for yourselves!”

The roar that rushed past Steve was even louder than the walls coming down as the last swarm of people rushed past Steve, shouting and cheering and screaming their discontent, loud enough that it would surely be heard by the citizens of New Versailles even on the highest floors of their towers.

Steve waited until the majority of the ground team passed him before he grabbed Tony's elbow. “Are you armed?”

“Always.” Tony grinned and reached into his rucksack. When he came out, he had two heavy gauntlets strapped to his hands. “Something I whipped up. You were my inspiration.”

Steve frowned down at the metal gloves. Tony had slapped a bad paint job on them: bright red. “Are they an offensive weapon?”

“You tell me,” Tony told him. A sentinel was passing close to them, flying away from the woman with the white mohawk raining lightning down onto it. Tony lifted his hands and pointed them, palms out, at the sentinel. His eyes tracked the sentinel for a few seconds, hands following along. Then his hands jerked back as his gauntlets fired, blasting some sort of white-blue plasma bolt. It hit the sentinel straight straight in the head, engulfing it in a flash of white hot light. The sentinel seemed to keep on in its flight for a half second, until the smoke cleared and revealed its head had been shorn straight off. It started to fall in the next moment, rocket boots sputtering out. It crashed to the ground and stayed down.

“That'll do,” Steve said with a nod.

They took off together for the hole in the wall, racing down the field just behind the ground troops. Tony's rucksack bounced on his shoulders as he stumbled along behind Steve, smacking him on the back with each step. Steve slapped his hands together as they approached the main fray of battle, bringing his shield up around himself and Tony as a sphere. As they climbed through the rocky crater that used to be the city walls, a sentinel bore down on them, still sputtering to life with both arms ripped off and a hole in its side. Steve's concentration stayed with keeping his shield up, since he knew it could take the full force of a sentinel's blast. Beside him, however, Tony was bringing his hands up, palms trained on the sentinel's head.

“Tony, don't-” Steve tried to warn him. But Tony ignored him, firing his blasts inside the shield.

Tony's plasma bolts passed through Steve's shield, knocking the sentinel down. Steve let his shield drop around them as he examined the mechanical corpse. “How'd you do that?” he asked.

Tony grinned and winked. “Trade secret. Or maybe there's a kid on Natasha's team with the ability to walk through anything, thanks to a probability field disruptor. Not a hundred percent on how it works, but figured out enough to borrow it. My blasts are coded to pass through your shield.”

Steve brought his shield back up around them as they slid their way down the side of the sentinel. “I guess you really did have my shield in mind,” he commented.

“I've always got you on my mind,” Tony promised. They found their feet at the bottom of the sentinel, fully inside the walls of New Versailles.

Tony's flirtatious grin died on his lips as he took a good look around, his footsteps faltering next to Steve's.

“Oh,” he whispered quietly.

Steve was watching him with concern. “Tony? Do you know where to go? Has it changed too much?” Much of this part of the plan was dependent on Tony's ability to know where control rooms were and how to shut them down, before they made their way to the main palace. If he couldn't remember, or if things had changed too much in the interim twenty years since Tony had lived here, they would have to play it by ear and hope Natasha's team was having better luck.

“No, no, it's... It's exactly the same,” Tony breathed. His eyes tracked up, scaling buildings and hopping from rooftop to rooftop. “Exactly the same.”

A blast shook the ground beneath their feet: another sentinel coming down, or maybe one of the gates blasted into oblivion. Whatever it was, it was enough to snap Tony out of his memories and bring him back to the present. He nodded firmly, mouth set in a grim line. “Right. Let's find my old friends, shall we?” Tony took off running down the streets, leaving Steve no choice but to trust him and follow.

Steve kept his shield up around them as they ran, but that didn't stop them from being shot at by the defenses their ground teams had yet to take out. A sentinel blast exploded the ground right from under their feet, sending Steve and Tony hurtling forward into Steve's shield. Steve kept them enclosed in a bubble as they rolled, bouncing around the walls and into each other. They came to a stop at the base of a building, in a tangle of limbs. Steve shook his head viciously and propped himself up, blinking out through the smoke at the courtyard they had just been blasted through. There wasn't much of a yard left to it, after that.

“Hey, this is stop numero uno,” Tony said from somewhere around Steve's waist. Steve glanced down to see Tony peering up at the skyscraper they were propped up against.

“Which one?” Steve asked as they climbed back to their feet and Tony led him around the building to a door.

Steve dropped the shield in front of them to let Tony access to the keypad on the side of the door. “Monitoring,” Tony explained as he worked. He produced a few metal tools from his rucksack—screwdriver, spanner, pliers, some other things Steve didn't recognize—and was methodically ripping apart the panel to get access to its wiry innards. “All their surveillance on us comes into this building. We take this offline, we blind them. Defensive systems are a few more blocks down, so I figured we hit this one before that.”

“As long as this won't take too long.” Steve had wanted to get to the defensive systems first, since taking them offline would lessen casualties. But taking down their eyes should do that, too, to a lesser extent. Steve bounced from foot to foot as he waited on Tony, eyes scanning the battlefield behind them. It was quieting down, in this part of the city. The fighting had moved past them, sounded like.

“In like Flynn, Huckleberry Finn,” Tony mumbled half to himself. A moment later there was an electronic beep from the door. Steve turned towards it, one eye still on the courtyard at their backs. To Tony's great excitement, the door slid open before them. Tony grinned and packed his things away, tucking his backpack over his shoulder again. He ducked inside the building without hesitation, leaving Steve to scramble after him.

Once through the door Steve's steps faltered. The door slid shut behind him, shutting out the noise of battle and bright early morning sunlight. It took his eyes a second to adjust to the light inside, but not long. The lights in the hallway were bright—much brighter than any they had out in the ghettos. The air was chill and fresh, quiet hum of air conditioning units barely audible even in the thick silence. Steve kept his shield lowered as he looked around, taking it all in. It was just like the storeroom him and Bucky had been in a dozen times. It was all plush, expensive, advanced.

“Up ahead,” Tony called back. Steve shook himself and jogged forward, bringing himself up level with Tony. They walked quickly down the hallway, Tony leading, Steve following. Tony seemed to know exactly what he was looking for.

Tony turned to whisper in Steve's ear: “There's a central control room, top floor, middle of the building. We should take the stairs in case they're watching us. They could shut down the elevators.”

Steve was about to nod when they passed by a room with a clear, wall-length window. Steve's boots squeaked over the tile floor, he stopped so fast.

“Tony!” His arm shot out and grabbed Tony's, dragging him back. “Tony, it's us!”

Tony came up alongside Steve, cupping his hands around his face and pressing them to the glass. Steve peered into the glass nervously, wringing his hands. Inside the room was a bank of monitors, showing inside rooms of some building. _This_ building, apparently, because Steve and Tony were visible on one of the screens. While Steve watched the screens, Tony turned around, eyes scanning the ceiling for a moment before they locked onto the camera. He waved cheerily.

“Tony!” Steve hissed.

Tony shook his head. “Look at the rest of the room.” Steve looked: it was empty.

“Where is everyone?”

Tony shrugged. “Not watching  _these_ monitors, obviously. We might run into trouble in central upstairs. But looks like any auxiliary staff has cut their losses and bailed. Come on.” Tony nodded his head back they way they had been heading. “Let's move.”

There was a stairwell at the end of the hallway that they reached in another minute or two. Tony nodded at the door and let Steve kick it open, shield up. No one was there. As they climbed the long stairs—twenty-seven flights, according to Tony—Tony expanded further on the idea of auxiliary staff.

“When I found out Yinsen was a slave, or more correctly a prisoner, it occurred to me that there must be other people here who were in the same situation. I started looking into it, and it turned out most of the people who worked in the city were prisoners, just like him. The surveillance staff, the chefs, even the lab assistants and teachers, like Yinsen was. It wasn't just unskilled work, but rather any work that wasn't a leadership or independently functioning position. The head of the surveillance center has to be someone free, but anyone else who works under him or her could be a prisoner. Probably is.”

“Was there anything keeping them here besides the walls and defensive systems that we ran into?” Steve asked. “They won't... explode if they escape, or something, would they?”

Tony shook his head. “Not as far as I ever knew. They might have changed something in the last twenty years, but I doubt it. They sent prisoners on supply runs, sometimes. They'd be cutting off their feet as far as utility of the prisoners go.”

Steve nodded to himself as they continued to climb the stairs. Good. He didn't need to feel responsible for more deaths today.

Steve took the rucksack from Tony somewhere around floor fifteen, and by floor twenty-seven had to wait as Tony slowly dragged himself up the last three flights below him.

“Go on without me,” Tony panted.

Steve rolled his eyes. “I would, except I don't know where to go. Or how to shut down the system. If I could just break everything with my shield, I'd be in there twenty minutes ago and busted it all apart by now.”

Tony rolled his eyes as he ascended the last couple steps and drew level with Steve—or as level as he could get, with the four or five inches Steve had on him.

“Some things require _finesse_ ,” Tony pointed out as he reached for the door handle. “You can't just blast-”

An explosion rocketed the door open. Steve brought his shield up just in time, collapsing himself forward onto Tony to make sure they'd both be covered. The door slammed into his shield, bouncing up and off it, over their heads and down the stairwell. Steve gaped through his shield in astonishment at the jagged hole where the door used to be.

Tony pushed Steve off him, glaring up at the door like it had personally offended him by blowing up. “Booby-trap,” Tony explained through gritted teeth. “Guess we're on the right floor.”

Steve pushed himself to his feet, then reached down to help Tony up. They entered the floor cautiously: Steve's shield up, Tony's gauntlets held out in front of him. The floor itself was quiet, blast from the door notwithstanding. Steve glanced down the hall on the right, while Tony looked down the left. Both were quiet. Tony nodded straight ahead of them. “This way,” he told Steve.

Heart still hammering from that explosion, Steve followed Tony down the hallway. Monitor banks flew past them on either side. Steve did his best to ignore them, but as they were about to turn a corner something caught his eye.

“Tony!” Steve cried out.

Stumbling to a halt, Tony backtracked until he was next to Steve. “What?”

In horror Steve pointed at the monitor in front of him. On it, Johnny Storm was alone in a room, beating helplessly against the walls. His hands were black with soot, no flames flickering up from them. Another monitor, alongside the first, showed the view from just outside the room Johnny was in. Sue was there, flickering in and out of visibility, beating at a door futilely. It was the door Johnny was trapped just on the other side of, his blows becoming weaker by the second.

“What's happening to him?!”

“That's a lab. Oh, shit, Steve: that's one of the laser labs. That's a vacuum.”

“What?”

The look on Tony's face was one of mounting horror. “That lab, I've worked in that lab. We can suck the air out of it in a matter of seconds. It's why he can't light up his hands: there's no oxygen in the room.”

“But if there's no oxygen then he can't breathe!”

On the screen, Johnny was slumping down in front of the door, fingers scraping against the immobile steel. Sue was still smacking at the door, turning it invisible and visible in turn, like that would do anything. She turned it invisible as Johnny fell to the floor, crawling down to sit with him on the other side. It was obvious even from the low-quality surveillance footage that she was crying.

“Come on.” Tony tugged at Steve. “Come on, we have to shut this down.”

Steve let himself be dragged away from the horrific sight, but now that he had seen it, he couldn't stop looking at the monitors as they passed them. Every one of them showed some scene of the battle taking place for their freedom, whether it was a camera inside New Versailles itself or surveillance from the ghettos. On one screen was a view from the felons' ghetto. The children that Steve had spoken to, months ago: Billy, Teddy, and Kate. They were fighting for all they were worth, working together to take a sentinel down. In the time it took Steve to walk past the monitor, Teddy grabbed the sentinel's legs and tripped it forward, Billy electrified it into falling even more, and then Kate swung down from a lamppost onto its back to sink two electrical grenades into its neck. The three darted away from the sentinel as it blew, shuddering into a spastic death.

On the next monitor was the young man Tony had bought the car from, Peter. He was swinging overhead a sentinel with those cables he had shown Steve, red gloves abandoned as he used his prosthetics proudly.

Steve's heart stopped when he caught a flash of a familiar hovercraft on the next monitor. Jess flew high above a sentinel, plastic covering of her craft down or blown off, brown hair whipping through the air as she shouted something. Below her, Danny and Luke were attacking a sentinel bare-handed, ripping apart one of its legs as it tried to fire down at them. Jess' craft got clipped as Steve watched, and she had to fight to steady it.

“Steve.”

Reluctantly, Steve dragged himself away from the monitor and hurried to catch up to Tony down the hall. He couldn't watch them all. He wasn't doing any good watching them. The most good he could do was shut down this building, then move onto the next one where the defenses were. The faster he shut that down, the faster all of them, everyone who was fighting for them out in the ghettos and streets of New Versailles, would be safe.

They turned another corner and Tony stopped, glancing around. Monitors lined the walls around then, filled the cubicles where seats sat abandoned. Tony frowned back and forth, brows furrowed.

“What?” Steve asked.

“There should be...”

Abruptly Tony turned to his left, and stepped through a door that looked like every other one in this place. Steve followed him quick as he could.

It was a server room of some sort. There weren't any monitors here, just rows upon rows of RAID towers. The room was freezing, so cold that Steve could see his breath. He tugged his coat around him tighter and buttoned it up. Tony did the same.

“Took you long enough,” a voice rang out.

Tony's entire body tensed, like he was about to cut and run. Or, as he lifted his hands up towards the source of the voice, maybe like he was going to do some serious blasting.

“Tony?” Steve whispered. He brought the shield up, squinting through the dimly lit room. He couldn't see anyone else.

“Get your ugly face out here, Obie!” Tony called out. Steve snapped his mouth shut and stepped forward so he was just behind Tony's right shoulder. Obie. Tony's old mentor. The one who tried to have him killed, who forced his flight.

A man stepped out of the shadows before them. He was a wealthy-looking man: older without any of the strain of age, rotund in a way that spoke of plentiful eating but not gluttony. His head was shaved neatly, his beard trimmed into a more full version of Tony's own goatee. In his mouth he held a cigar, unlit. Steve waited, at Tony's back, as the man drew closer.

“Tony, my boy. You're looking well. Life outside hasn't been too hard on you, I take it?”

“You look like shit. Where'd all your hair go?” Tony snapped back.

Obadiah laughed and ran a self-deprecating hand over his bald head. “Yeah, well: can't have it all, can we? That's a lesson you never learned.”

Tony's body went loose, forced-casual, like this was the easiest conversation in the world for him to be having. Steve kept his shield up around them, eyes trained on Obadiah.

“Doesn't seem like you guys ever learned it either. You sure like to keep everything for yourselves. Your motto should be, ' _you_ can't have it all, but _I_ can,' am I right?”

Obadiah shook his head and tsked. “Tony, Tony, Tony. Still going on about all your perceived injustices in the world? Still think we're so petty?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Why? You gonna tell me different?”

“Were you old enough, before you left, for your father to tell you about the Illuminati?”

Tony shrugged. “No. But I have a feeling you're about to.”

“The Illuminati was a group your father and I belonged to, along with some of the other men and women of esteem in the city. Baron Zemo, Arnim Zola, Madam Hydra...”

“Wow, so you just listed my who's-who of despicable assholes I hated growing up, carry on.”

Steve ground his teeth together at the mention of Baron Zemo, but stayed silent. This was Tony's fight.

“The Illuminati were a secret society, Tony. One dedicated to keeping people safe. Keeping the world secure.”

Tony sniffed disdainfully. “Fucking pretentious name, you know that? Fits. But don't pretend like you thought you were protecting the greater good, or some such shit. You guys were in it for yourselves. All you ever did, you did to keep down the people outside these walls.” Tony gestured behind him, trying to encompass everyone out there in the ghettos with one wave of his hand.

“It may seem that way, but it wasn't, Tony. We did this for them.”

“How is keeping people starving to death helping them?!” Tony shouted. “You have the technology! I was _inventing_ the technology, and the _second_ you realized what I was up to, you tried to have me killed. Because... why?! Just, give me that, Obie. Before I kill you, just tell me _why_. Why keep the people in poverty, starving to death, when you have the ability to help them? Why did you try and kill me when I came up with my QC?” Tony's hand came up to tap at his chest. “You can stay in your walled city if you want to, you can hog up ninety percent of the resources. But I had a way to make it so that _everybody_ could have enough energy to feed themselves, clothe themselves, house themselves. Why not just let them _have it_?”

“You really think we were going to kill you just because you were some idealistic young kid who wanted to give energy to the masses?” Obadiah laughed.

“Yes!” Tony shouted. “You couldn't stand the thought of making things better for them. And you knew I figured out how!”

“You always were an egotistical little shit.” Obadiah chomped on his cigar, eyes gleaming. Steve's hackles rose. There was a lot more to this: a lot more than Tony had keyed into, yet. “Plenty of kids want to save the world. We weren't threatened by that.”

“Then what the hell, Obie?! Why the hunt? Why'd you chase me down? Why'd you kill Yinsen?!”

“You were stumbling onto something a lot bigger than just some energy solution, son.”

Obadiah's words reverberated through the server room. Tony jerked back like he'd been slapped across the face. For a second he stopped, took a half-step back. Steve shifted just enough so he could place a hand on the small of Tony's back, holding him in place. Letting him know he had Steve's support, just behind him.

“Why don't you tell me what that is?” Tony asked, cautiously.

Obadiah just raised his eyebrows, head bobbing in disbelief that Tony would even try something that transparent. Tony growled and raked a hand through his hair.

“What could it be, Obie? I invented a quantum computer. What application of it was so much more dangerous than free energy for everyone?”

“ You think  _ no one _ , in the history of the  _ human race _ , ever figured out a quantum computer before your arrogant ass came along?  _ No one _ ?!  _ Ever _ ?!” Obadiah scoffed while Tony stared on, dumbfounded. “You really are the most narcissistic masturbatory little prick this side of your father.”

Tony growled.

Obadiah coughed. He stopped and took the cigar out of his mouth, looking down at it curiously. When he coughed again he tossed the cigar away and smiled. 

“You always liked looking into the tiny details, kid. But sometimes you looked so far and so deep, you forgot to pull back and look at the bigger picture.”

“What bigger picture?”

Obadiah was coughing more steadily now, hand held over his mouth. When he pulled it away for a second, Steve saw flecks of bloody foam at the corners of his mouth. “He poisoned himself!” he told Tony.

Tony swore. There wasn't anything they could do now, though. He stayed back, and Steve stood with him. There was no way to tell if this was a trap or not—best air on the side of caution.

“What bigger picture, Obie?” Tony prompted again.

“You saw the pixels,” Obadiah replied with a wheeze. He dropped to one knee, hacking viciously. Tony's hands were clenching and unclenching at his sides. Steve knew better to ask about the “pixels.” Tony would explain later, if this was making any sense to him.

“That's...” Tony hesitated, the first flicker of doubt passing over his face.

“Remember Eridanus?” Obadiah asked Tony with a weak laugh.

“Yeah, but that's just... I was just a stupid kid. Those were stupid theories.”

“We've all got theories, kid,” Obadiah wheezed. He collapsed further, down onto his side. “Yours were just too damn good. And you were too damn young. You might have wanted to do something about them.”

“Obie...”

Obadiah's body went slack, dropping down prone onto the ground. Tony broke rank and rushed forward to his side, gathering him up into his arms. Obadiah was still wheezing faintly, though the poison was doing its work fast. Steve hung back, eyes scanning the rows of server towers for an ambush. 

“Obie, Obie, no.”

“Up to you now, kid,” Obadiah told Tony.

“No, no. Obie. What-”

“Your world now. Maybe... do... something... different.”

Tony bent over Obadiah, talking too quietly for Steve to hear. His back shook as Obadiah's body went totally still. Tony's hands fumbled with Obadiah's, plucking futilely at the limp limbs. After a long minute he finally stood up, wiping at his face before turning back to Steve.

“Tony... I hate to ask, but what-”

“I don't know.” Tony shook his head, eyes falling back on Obadiah's lifeless body. “I don't know.”

“He seemed to think you did,” Steve pointed out.

“He was talking nonsense.”

“What did he mean by pixels? And that.. Erydans?”

“Eridanus supervoid. He's just... stupid theories I had when I was a kid. When I was discovering the principles that would lead to me building the quantum computer.”

“What were the theories?” Steve pressed. Obviously they were something important, if they were what Obadiah chose to talk about in his last minutes on earth. Or they might be a red herring, but something in his tone seemed certain, sure. Afraid. 

“Just...” Tony shook his head and looked around. “Let's kill this, come on. We still have to get to the defense systems after this.”

Clenching his jaw, Steve nodded. He wasn't about to let Obadiah's words go, but Tony was right: this was more imminent. 

Steve brought his hands together and flared out his shield. “Right. Tell me what to do.”

Tony shook his head as he hurried down the rows of servers, head swinging this way and that. 

“Not that. Grab the charges out of my backpack. There's got to be... Ah!” 

Steve hurried around the corner that Tony had just ducked around to find him standing in front of a massive back of switches and dials. It looked like gibberish to Steve, but apparently it held some significance to Tony.

“Charges here.” Tony tugged off his gauntlets and clapped his hands. Quickly Steve swung the rucksack off his shoulder and rummaged through it, holding it in his left hand by one shoulder strap. His hands closed around something round and hard, so he pulled it out and held it up for Tony to examine. 

Tony nodded. “Yup. Toss it here. There should be two more, and a brick of plastic explosives.”

Steve reached inside twice more and tossed the two hard disks to Tony, then held onto the explosives at his gesture. “Divvy it up, three ways. Flatten it out for me.” Steve did as instructed, then tossed the pieces to Tony. He busied himself setting the charges around the control panel, two up top, one down further towards the middle. 

Tony pressed a couple buttons, then darted towards Steve and grabbed his arm. “Let's go. We've got five minutes to get down twenty-seven flights of stairs, and you're gonna have to carry me the last ten.”

Steve hesitated as he followed Tony, glancing over at Obadiah's corpse as they passed it. “What about him?”

“It's a corpse, Steve. Leave it.”

Steve pressed his lips together, but hurried to catch up tot Tony after just a second's more deliberation. Tony was right. Obadiah was a corpse, and they would be slowed down fatally if they tried to carry him down the stairs. There was no point to it. Still, Steve followed Tony with a heavy heart as their boots thudded down the stairs, steps rising up in a cacophony of echoes in the stairwell. 

They busted through the ground floor door with a minute to spare. Steve adjusted Tony's rucksack over his shoulder as they raced down the hallway and out the front door into the bright sunlight. Steve threw up his shield as soon as Tony's hands hit the door, protecting them from whatever might be waiting for them outside. 

Tony tripped, breathing hard, as their feet met the marble paving stones outside. “Keep going,” Steve told him, grabbing his arm. Tony panted and nodded his head, stumbling along with Steve's help, further away from the building.

The blast rocked the top of the building when they were just about under the protection of the next building across the way. Steve turned and squinted up, head craning to catch sight of the twenty-seventh floor as it exploded outward in a shower of flames, glass, and steel. His shield held easily against the minimal falling debris that reached them from the initial explosion. The building groaned, unsteady in its firmaments, but settled after a moment. Flames engulfed the top story.

“It'll come down,” Tony observed after a moment. “The building, I mean. Give it another hour, it'll fall. Surveillance should be offline now.”

Steve nodded. “Let's get to the defense building. Where did you say it was?”

Tony nodded, hands on his hips as he took deep gulps of air. “Right. Six blocks down, closer to city center. This way, come on.”

Steve snorted a little as Tony started off in the direction he indicated. “You going to make it?”

Tony rolled his eyes and punched weakly at Steve. “Shut up. Not all of have your perfect, superhuman physique, okay?” Drawing a deep breath in, Tony nodded. “Okay, okay. I'm fine.”

They set off at a slow jog down the road, Steve keeping his shield up and senses alert for any danger. For the most part, it appeared that the battle had moved on from this point of New Versailles. There weren't any people or sentinels around. Any explosions or other sounds of battle were far, far off, only heard faintly when it was carried by the wind. 

“Are you going to tell me what he was talking about?” Steve asked Tony again, once they had jogged four blocks without running into a soul.

“I don't know,” Tony repeated. The way he said it through gritted teeth could be easily attributed to exertion, though Steve knew better. Tony was spooked, spooked _bad_ , and trying to hold it back. 

“Tony. I've got people here fighting and dying for a cause. If it's something... wrong, if there's something sinister underlying it all, I need to know.”

“Fairytales,” Tony replied, waving his hand. “Flights of fancy. Crazy theories of a kid-”

Tony stumbled, eyes going wide.

“Tony?”

Tony picked up his feet and kept jogging, faster now. Steve kept pace with him easily. “He said I wasn't the first, didn't he?” Tony mumbled.

Steve nodded. “Not the first to come up with a quantum computer. But what does that mean? Why would someone have come up with that kind of... an energy solution, and not use it?”

“He said it was bigger than energy. Said it was... the pixels...” Tony shook his head. “But it can't be true. It's just...”

“What? What's impossible?”

“But it's not impossible, is it?” Tony mumbled to himself. “It's _more than likely_. According to the math.”

“Tony?”

A crowd swelled around them as they reached the sixth block. Steve scanned it, looking for familiar faces. A flash of red hair stood out, even pulled back and matted down as it was. 

“Natasha!” Steve called out.

The head jerked up, revealing Natasha's face, soot-stained and bloody, but grinning underneath it all. It was a fairly terrifying grin.

“Steve!”

“Natasha! Report?”

“We just took down their defensive systems!” 

Steve gaped as he and Natasha finally pushed through the crowd to each other, grabbing each other's elbows. 

“You took down the defensive systems?”

Natasha grinned viciously. “My team was in position by the time Clint's ground team came in. With them keeping the heavy artillery off our backs, we were able to get up there and take down the systems easily. Figured it was better than waiting for you two.”

Steve breathed a sigh of relief. “We got held up when we were taking down the surveillance systems. But it's done now.”

“So the city is ours?” Natasha asked.

Steve breathed and looked around, at the crowd gathered in front of him. There was no danger, anymore. No explosions, no heavy pounding of artillery, the higher-pitched ping of guns or plasma rifles. No sentinels stomping with their great cannons. They were safe. The fighting was over. The city was theirs.

“Steve.” Tony's voice was panicked as he grabbed at Steve's arm, at his shoulder.

“What?”

“You have to get to the capital first.”

Steve frowned. “What do you mean?”

Tony's eyes were wide, his cheeks flushed. He licked his lips compulsively and drummed his fingers on his chest. “Steve, you have to. You can't let them go in there. It'll be there. There'll be proof.”

“Proof of what?”

“ _Get to the capital first_!” Tony shouted. He shook Steve hard, grip painful in its intensity. 

“You have to get there first! Our lives depend on it!”

Steve's eyes went wide in the face of Tony's intensity. He nodded, hands coming up to tug Tony gently off his arms. “Okay, okay. I'll get there first. Can you come with me?”

“Yeah.” Tony started laughing, a little hysterically. “Yeah, I'll go with you. I've got to see this. Otherwise I won't believe it.”

“Okay.” Steve glanced around, quickly figuring out how he was going to do this. “Natasha: me and Tony are going to take the capitol building, alone. I'm going to try and talk to everyone beforehand. If something holds us up, you and the rest of my generals keep the people out of there. Get them set up to occupy the city. Start letting them pick out rooms, food, showers, medical care. Whatever they need. Don't let them burn the place to the ground. Don't let them senselessly loot. We need to maintain order.”

“Got it,” Natasha said with a bob of her head, wisps of red hair coming free from where she'd pulled it back. 

“Alright Tony. Get me to the capital building.”

Tony started forward without another word, pushing his way faster through the crowd than Steve thought him capable; this new, unexplained fear giving his feet wings and arms strength. Steve struggled to keep up with him, to push through a crowd that was slowly realizing who he was and that he was here.

By the time they made their way to the capital steps, Steve had inadvertently brought the crowd with him. Tony was rushing ahead, but Steve grabbed him, hauling him back to turn and face the crowd. If they were going to keep the people from storming the palace and discovering whatever this “evidence” was that Tony was so afraid of, they had to do this right. They had to maintain control.

Steve waved to the crowd, the cheering as loud as the battle had ever gotten. Fumbling in his coat pocket, Steve brought out the phone that Sam had given him, the one that tapped into the Redwing network and transmitted through everything with a speaker.

“You are all amazing,” was the first thing Steve said, because it was the first thing he felt. Looking out on this dirty, exhausted crowd of people beneath him, Steve couldn't help feeling a fierce and overwhelming _pride_ in every one of these brave people. “The city is ours.”

Another cheer from the crowd, a great groundswell of feeling and sound. Steve grinned and waved them quiet again. “Now comes the hard work. The clean-up, the distributions. Rest easy tonight, because tomorrow we start building our new society. Our fair society. To the people who are here with me, I ask you to look to your generals this afternoon. They will find you lodgings, food, warm water to bathe in. Indulge yourselves today: you deserve it. To my brave fighters in the ghettos, stay safe, tend to your wounded, and start cleaning up what the sentinels destroyed. Tomorrow, we start organizing shipments of supplies out to you, distributing what was always rightly ours. In the weeks that follow, we can begin putting ourselves to work for ourselves: in fields, in factories. We have the means, we have the manpower, and we have the motivation. We can have everything New Versailles once hoarded for herself. We _will_ have everything these greedy few once enjoyed!”

The crowd cheered again and Steve waved his hands, pumping his fist in victory. He knew Tony was tense beside him, not sharing in the revelry that was sweeping the rest of the crowd. But that could wait one more minute. He couldn't take this victory from the people yet, no matter how dire Tony's fears were. 

As the crowd quieted down Steve started scanning the people in front of him, looking for a few specific faces. “Now, Generals? Where-”

Natasha had stuck close to him, so she was the first up the steps, along with the brown-haired, brown-skinned Daisy that had been her co-leader. Clint was perched on the roof of a three-story building outside the palace. He waved until he was noticed, then disappeared. It would take him a minute to get to the steps. Rhodey was next, heavy artillery shoulder-mounts lost at some point throughout the day. Tony shook his hand warmly as he jogged up the stairs, but then backed away just as quickly. Rhodey shot him a questioning look, but Tony just shook his head.

Sam was next, to Steve's great relief. He rushed forward and hugged the other man tight, pressing his face to Sam's neck. 

“You can't believe how happy I am that you're alive,” Steve said as they pulled apart.

Sam rolled his eyes and punched Steve good-naturedly in the shoulder. “Not all your friends are gonna die tragically in battle, alright? I got you.”

Steve laughed and pressed his forehead to Sam's, giddy with relief. He hadn't let himself think about it during the battle, but now that he had a second to relax his knees felt weak with all the fear and anxiety he had been suppressing.

Remembering what he had seen on the monitors, Steve stopped scanning the crowd for Johnny's exuberant bouncing or flickering flames. In all likelihood, Sue would be sticking back for now. Steve took a breath and kept a brave face on, not thinking to hard on the horror of Johnny's death. 

Clint and Bobbi pushed through the crowd a minute later, grinning and pleased with themselves. Sam was looking around for Sue and Johnny too, it seemed, so Steve put a hand on his arm and very subtly shook his head. Sam's face fell. There'd be time enough to mourn later.

Steve turned back to the crowd. “These are your victorious generals,” he announced. The crowd cheered loudly. “Listen to them. Get yourselves settled. Take a day to enjoy yourselves! You deserve it!”

The crowd went wild again, and Steve slapped Sam on the shoulder. Leaning in close, Steve whispered in Sam's ear: “Don't let them into the palace. Tony says there's something in there, something we can't let them see.”

“Roger that, Rogers,” Sam promised. Steve squeezed Sam's shoulder and pressed the phone into his hand, even though he didn't need it with his cochlear implants.

With one last wave to the crowd, Steve turned to the palace, where Tony was waiting a couple steps above him. 

Steve placed his hand lightly on Tony's elbow as they walked up the steps together. “Do you want to tell me what's going on now?” Steve asked him. 

Tony shook his head. His face had gone white, and he was sweating more than he had when they were running. “No,” he replied shortly. As they reached the overhang in front of the building, Tony shot a look over his shoulder at the crowd gathered behind them. “No. Not yet,” he whispered. “I might be wrong.”

The palace was empty when they entered it. Steve had his hands in front of him, at the ready to throw up his shield at the slightest hint of an attack. But as they walked further into the marble halls, they remained silent, save for the echoes of their heavy boot steps. 

“Tony?” Steve asked. 

Ahead of him, Tony was darting furtive looks down the halls. His flashy red coat suddenly looked too big on him, ill-fitted. Like a kid playing dress-up at being an adult. 

“I don't know this place,” Tony confided to Steve. They approached a massive oak door, lacquered shiny. Tony ran his fingertips over the ornate carvings in the wood. It depicted the fall of Eve, in the garden. The serpent's neck was one door handle, Eve's outstretched arm the other. 

Tony wrapped his long, elegant fingers around the serpent's throat and tugged. The door came open smoothly: not a creak from its massive hinges. 

The room before them was dark and deep. At its far end, a series of throne-like chairs. The sole illumination of which was a glowing computer screen, situated before them. Steve started towards the monitor without hesitation, certain the end to whatever secrets Tony was keeping would be on it. 

Tony hung back, following Steve at a distance like every step was being forced from him. A fish on a line, being pulled out of its watery home to its death. 

As Steve drew closer to the monitor, it became clear that there was a single line of text on it. Steve squinted, steps picking up their pace as curiosity egged him on. 

“Tony?” Steve called back. 

The words were becoming clearer. Steve cocked his head, confused by what appeared to be... “Poetry?” he asked aloud. 

But when he turned back to face Tony, Steve knew the words meant much more than that. Tony's face was contorted in horror, tears welling up in his eyes. His hands came up to his hair, gripping like he wanted to tear it from his head. Tony looked like his whole world was ending. A horrible moan welled up from his throat, like a hole tearing through his chest.

“It's true. It's true. Oh, no, no, no, no. It's true. I was right. I was... I was right. It's true.”

Steve turned back to the monitor, a growing dread in his heart. 

“Everything you know is unreal. The world isn't as it seems. You are not alive. You're a simulated world on a screen.”

 

 


	12. Deadlines and Commitments

 

Boot steps echoed through the cavernous hallways, bouncing from marble floor to mahogany paneled walls, off vaulted ceilings that cradled the echoes like they were something precious. Beyond the great walls of the palace, the sounds of life returning to the city crept in through open windows. People were talking, shouting, laughing. Children chased each other through the streets, reunited with their parents who had left them behind to fight for their freedom. Vendors sold their wares, engineers scrambled to gut the city of its technology, autopsying sentinels, spilling their secrets. Men and women with strong backs and clever hands rebuilt buildings, patched up the streets. Rhodey was down at one of the four great gates, hugging Jessica Jones tight as Danny beeped impatiently at them from inside the front car of the train. 

Inside the palace, the day was less bright, the air less warm with joy and promise. Steve's footsteps were lonely, the only sign of life in its deserted halls. Or they were, until Steve's steps brought him closer to the main chamber of the palace. The closer he got to the room, the louder the singing became. 

Steve pushed open one heavy door of the chamber and was immediately assaulted by Tony's out-of-tune notes. 

“It's the end of the world as we know it! It's the end of the world as we know it! It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fiiiineee.”

Steve scowled as he made the long walk to the front of the room. Tony sat, sprawled across the center chair, looking like a dispossessed Napoleonic emperor in his gaudy red coat and unkempt hair. His cheeks were flush with alcohol—wine, apparently, if the bottle dangling between his fingertips was any clue. One leg hung over the front of the throne, the other over one of its arms. 

The screen they couldn't shut off still stood in front of him, its four sentence message glowing mockingly. 

Steve stopped just short of the start of the dais the thrones stood upon. “Tony.”

“Steve! Steve! Here, sing along! I'll teach you the words.” Tony's hands started to wave through the air like a conductor. At the top of his lungs he screamed: “IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT-”

“Stop singing that damn song,” Steve growled. 

Tony just grinned at that. “Okay. How's 'Waking up at the start of the end of the world, but it's feeling like any other morning before-'”

“ _Tony_ ...”

Tony sat up, looking a hell of a lot more sober than he should be able to—though no less broken. “Or, or! 'And this is the end, yeaahh, this is the eeeeend, of the woooorllddd....'”

“ _Tony_...”

“We've taken care of everything, the words you read, the songs you sing, The pictures that give pleasure to your eyes, It's one for all and all for one, We work together, common sons, Never need to wonder how or why!”

“ _Tony_...”

“You know, there's a hell of a lot more songs about the end of the world or the world being a virtual prison than there by any rights _should_ be. Do you think it's some sort of Jungian collective awareness of our situation? Some sort of zeitgeist that arose from the junk data of the simulation, only to be legible to our subconscious minds? I'd say I want to write a paper on it, but I can't exactly _publish_ , now can I?"

Steve took a step forward, anger rising. “Tony!”

Tony laughed and held the wine bottle out at Steve's face. “ _What_ , Steve?! _What_ do you want from me? A drink? A fuck?”

Steve snatched the wine bottle out of Tony's hand and flung it across the room. It shattered somewhere in the distance. Neither Steve nor Tony looked where it went: they were too busy staring each other down. After a moment Steve broke, his expression softening. He reached out to place a hand on Tony's shoulder. Tony flinched away.

When Steve spoke again, he kept his voice calm and low. “It's been a week, Tony. We have jobs to do. We barely got some of the less damaged train lines back up and running, and we've had cars driving out to the ghettos, but that won't be good enough for long. We need to set up more permanent supply lines. More permanent  _everything_ : houses, apartments, sewage systems. We need to build schools and factories-”

“How are you not _getting_ this?!” Tony shouted. He shoved his way upright and grabbed at Steve's shirt, shaking him roughly. Steve bore the assault. “Do you not understand it? Are you too much of a fucking meathead for it to penetrate your thick skull? _Nothing. Matters_. None of this. _We're not real_. Those people out there that you want to give an education to, that you're worried about feeding and clothing and housing? _They're not real_. _You're_ not real! This fucking throne, this computer screen—which, yeah, trip on that for two seconds, the screen that's telling us nothing is real is also unreal itself, how's that for recursion—none of it is real. None of it matters!”

Gently Steve laid his hands over Tony's, tugging them off his shirt. “Maybe it's not real, but maybe it still matters,” he countered.

Tony scoffed and rolled his eyes, turning away. He tripped over himself as he stumbled down from the dais, wandering aimlessly through the room. Steve followed at a distance. “I think we need to work on your definition of 'matters'.”

“It does matter,” Steve insisted.

“Unreal things don't matter, Steve.”

Steve scurried after Tony as he left the room. “Of course unreal things can matter. Stories matter. Works of fiction, folk tales, fables. Those can matter-”

Tony threw his hands up as he strode down the halls. “Not to the people in the story, Steve! They can't! Because they're  _not. Real_ !”

“We're real,” Steve insisted. Because what else could he do, to conquer the existential dread which had frozen his heart for the past week. “We may be... maybe we're a simulation, maybe we're not _real-_ real, but we're still real. In our own way. I'm... I can think, I've got feelings. I know you, and you know me. We couldn't know each other if we weren't real.”

Tony had led the two of them to his rooms—the rooms he had claimed for himself the first day they invaded the palace. He spun around, leaning seductively on his doorway. Steve hesitated and pulled up short.

“You wanna test that theory? You wanna _know_ me again, Steve?”

Steve flushed and frowned mightily at Tony. “That's not what I meant.”

“I've got hot water. We could take a shower together. _Know_ each other all over again.”

“We shouldn't be indulging right now,” Steve insisted. “We still have too much work to do. The people-”

“ _Aren't! Real_!” Tony screamed. 

“ _Morals are_!” Steve screamed back.

Tony pulled back, and so did Steve. He never lost his temper like that. Steve pressed a hand to his chest, trying to calm the flames of fear that had fanned up beneath his breastbone. He was scared. He was brave enough to admit that. He was scared by what that little screen had said, scared by Obadiah's taunts. Scared by how scared  _Tony_ was, because Steve didn't understand it all, didn't know the math behind it, but Tony did. And Tony was terrified. 

“Just... for now, until we figure out something more to do, why don't we try and... game the system? If everything is just a computer program, if we _know_ that everything's just streams of numbers, can't we use that to our advantage? Make everyone the best off they could be? Get everyone food, clothing, medicine, houses? Make our world the best possible one?”

Tony pressed his face to his hands, scrubbing them over and over. He pulled away with a groan. “If we're in a simulation, then someone is running the simulation. Which means there's a  _reason_ they're running it. Whatever the reason is, whatever they're trying to study—sociology, physics, engineering—it all goes out the window if we become self-aware: realize we're in a simulation. They'll shut us down.”

“Maybe not. Maybe the point of the simulation was to see what happened when the people become aware that they're in a simulation.”

“There would be no point. You run a simulation to get useable data. Useable data means data that applies to you. If the people who run the simulation know _they're_ not in a simulation, the simulation becomes useless once those in the simulation realize they're in one, because their social structure, physical inquiries, everything they do will be shaped by that revelation. One that _couldn't_ happen in the real universe, where the simulations are being run. Our only chance at survival, if unreal constructs can even be said to 'survive', is to keep on like nothing's wrong.”

“Then we don't let anyone else know,” Steve proposed. Then he winced at that level of dishonesty. “For now. We take our time to figure out something else, and for now, we keep the simulation under wraps. But you, what you were doing _before_ we knew we were in a simulation: you can do that much at least. Can't you? Build apartments, run the trains, till the fields. You can build more quantum computers, teach others how to do it, and output enough energy to feed everyone, clothe everyone, house everyone.” _Save everyone_.

Tony was shaking his head. “Don't you understand? I _can't_ give anyone else this technology. The more people who figure out quantum technology, the more people will figure out what the data means.”

“What data?”

Tony scrubbed the back of his head. “Quantum technology isn't just a new engineering solution. It's a new way of doing physics. And as you start to flesh out the rules of quantum physics, a picture starts to form. Because of one rule, another one crops up, except this one is a little bit weird. Pixelization happens. You spot the Eridanus Supervoid. Multiple worlds. And before you know it, people start figuring it out for themselves. Just like I did when I was a teenager. Only, maybe a couple of them take it seriously, start looking into it more.”

“This is what Obadiah was going on about,” Steve realized. “He said you were going to have to make a choice. See what you do.”

“He knew what I'd do.” Tony's lips pressed together into a thin line. The skin around his eyes was pulled tight.

“But that...” Steve's mind whirred as he tried to process what Tony had said. “That means...”

“They were doing the right thing,” Tony finished for him.

Immediately Steve jumped on that. “No. No they weren't. They-”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Maybe not the  _right_ thing. But it wasn't the  _wrong_ thing, either. We  _can't_ let the masses get technologically sophisticated. Or if we do, we have to keep  _extremely_ careful control over it. They can't be allowed to learn anything about quantum physics, quantum mechanics. They can't learn astrophysics either, for that matter. Every piece of technology they have has to be handed down to them from us, and we have to retain complete control over it. No reverse-engineering. No geniuses.”

“That's why they had laws against prosthetics.”

“It's why they did every asinine thing they did. They had laws against prosthetics to keep the people from becoming too technologically advanced. They blocked the people from getting an education so no one would get smart enough to figure things out. They kept us poor because they couldn't let us have any advanced technology, out of fear that we'd reverse engineer it, then expand on it. Everything awful about the world, it was that way to keep us alive. To keep us existing.”

“There's a better way,” Steve said with certainty. He might not understand everything about quantum physics, about all that “evidence” Tony claimed proved the truth of the monitor's words. But he knew, without a doubt, that there was a better way to deal with the problem of their unreality than the citizens of New Versailles had been dealing with it. Any choice that left people suffering, starving, and sickly, was a poor choice. Simulated people or not, their suffering was real enough for Steve.

Tony shook his head tiredly and reached for his door. His hands wrapped slowly around the edge of it, staring blearily down like the door was going to tell him the solution to their problems. “Yeah, well. You think about that, Steve. Wake me when you've figured it out.”

As Tony started to shut his door, Steve reached out and put a hand on it, arresting its movement.

“We have to tell the others. Our friends, at least.”

Tony shrugged. “Tell them. See if I care. But the more people you tell, the higher chance that this'll get out. And the only reason we're still alive is because most people don't know.”

With that, Tony shut the door on Steve, leaving him alone in the hallway. No solution presented itself.

 

 


	13. Here with Me

 

Tony was drumming his fingers on the the table, one leg swung over the arm of his chair as he tilted back carelessly in it. Steve did his best to ignore him. He seemed drunk again, red-eyed and glassy. Though Steve hadn't smelled any alcohol on his breath when he convinced Tony to come with him this morning. They were sitting in what was presumably a dinning hall back before they took the city: long tables with doors that led to an extensive kitchen. Now Steve planned to destroy his friends' worldviews in this room. It didn't seem the least bit fitting, but Steve supposed not everything in life could have symmetry or meaning. Have too much synchronicity, and people might start thinking the world was a simulation or something.

Hesitating for a second, Steve finally decided to lean over towards Tony. “Are you okay?”

“No.”

Steve winced. Stupid question. “I mean, are you okay with this? With telling our friends.”

“I know what you meant.”

Tony stared straight ahead through the whole exchange, his fingers never faltering in their rhythm. Steve sat back in his chair and turned to the door in front of him. Right. Tony thought they shouldn't tell anyone. That the more people they told, the more chance they had of getting... shut down. But they had to tell their friends. That handful of people at least deserved to know. Besides the fact that Steve didn't know how to talk to Sam while he held this kind of knowledge and Sam didn't.

The doors opened, and their friends filtered in one-by-one. Sam came in first, announcing that Clint and Natasha were busy checking out some information about a mostly off-record prison within the city. Next was Jennifer, then Rhodey. Sue sent her husband Reed in her place, presumably because she was still mourning the loss of her brother. Steve wasn't certain about the substitution, but Tony had nodded glumly. From what little Steve knew of Sue's husband, he was some kind of genius scientist, the like of which could rival even Tony Stark. But he focused on theoretical physics, not engineering solutions like Tony did.

Steve glanced around the room, mouth set in a grim line. “This is everyone that can make it, then?”

Nods from Reed and Sam.

Steve sighed, ran a hand through his hair. No use delaying it. “Sam, I need you to stop recording this, if you are.”

Sam grinned as he tilted back lazily in his chair. “The people haven't seen you in a week, Steve. They want to know what's happened to their conquering hero.”

Steve let his gaze drop, and took a breath. When he flicked his eyes back up at Sam, he let all the anger, sorrow, and fear that he was feeling shine through. Sam's grin fell immediately and he dropped his chair down to four feet.

“Alright, alright. They're off.”

“Thank you,” Steve replied honestly.

Now that everyone's attention was on him, Steve didn't know where to begin. Nervously Steve rubbed his palms on the edge of the grand dining table, implants catching on the soft wood. For all his planning and worrying over this moment, he still hadn't figured out how he was going to break it to his friends.

Luckily, it would appear that Tony had no such tactful reservations.

“The world's a simulation. The whole universe is. None of you are real. I'm not real. Steve's not real. Your children, friends, and fuck-buddies are all just spots of data on some dick's computer monitor. And you can't let anyone else know or the simulation gets shut down.”

The room was silent for long seconds. Sam was the one who finally broke the silence, laughing awkwardly. He looked around from Tony to Steve. “Okay, okay. Ha ha. So, uh. What's the real deal? Why have you guys been locked up in here for a week? Fucking like bunnies or something?”

“I wish,” Tony grumbled, but without any heart.

“It's true.” When Sam shot Steve an alarmed look, Steve shook his head viciously, ears heating. “No, not... not the sex part! The. The simulation. That's the secret they've been keeping here. That's why they have laws against prosthetics; it's why they don't give us an education. They couldn't let us find out, or we'd be shut down.”

Reed was the first to speak. “Well it's certainly theoretically possible-”

“Reed.” Tony cut him off. “It's certain. We have proof.”

Reed raised his eyebrows. Tony sighed. “I'll send the math over. We've got pixelization, the Eridanus Supervoid, quantum chromodynamics—which shows an anisotropy in the distribution of ultra-high energy cosmic rays, by the way, yeah—not to mention the fact that they told us.”

“They told you? And you believed them?” Jennifer snorted. She threw up her hands, hydraulics whirring in her exoskeleton. “You guys locked yourselves up in here and freaked out for a week over what some rich assholes told you while you were invading their city? Why the hell did I follow you two into battle, again?”

“Because we're not idiots,” Tony snapped. His eyes were redder now, and not because of alcohol. “Trust me, Jennifer. I've seen the data. I was halfway there myself when I was a teenager, just before I was ran out of the city.” Tony's fingers drummed on his chest, on the glow of blue that was bright beneath his tattered shirt.

Steve leaned forward. “Think about it, Jennifer. It explains all the actions of New Versailles. Generations ago, technology became so advanced scientists were working within quantum mechanics. They realized, thanks to all that smart-guy stuff Tony just listed at Mr. Richards, that reality was a simulation. And a simulation that's aware it's a simulation isn't any good at simulating reality, because everyone inside it's going to start working off the idea that reality is simulated, reacting to that. So, in order to avoid being shut down, a group of scientists decided to keep the secret. They had to arrest the development of technology, lest someone else come to the same conclusion, and word get out. They outlawed technology that would bridge the gap between man and machine: prosthetics. Then they limited access to education, so no one outside their group would be smart enough to figure out what they had. Then they kept us starving, cold, suffering, so even if we had the smarts, the tech, we wouldn't have the time or inclination.”

Rhodey growled. “Fun story. That what they tell you? That their excuse for shitting on us our whole lives? And you two _believed_ it?” He turned to Tony, eyes narrowed. “What the hell is your problem, man? Pull yourself together. You can't believe this crock of shit.”

“It's not a crock,” Tony mumbled. He was staring down at the table, eyes watering. “It's not a crock. It's reality. The reality of our unreality. You're not real. I'm not real. We're just... pixels on a screen.”

Rhodey sat back, looking like he'd gotten punched in the gut. Steve wasn't sure if that meant he believed them, or if he was just disturbed by the sight of his best friend so shaken, so broken. Sam looked like his natural inclination to believe Steve was at war with his natural inclination to believe he was _real_. Steve wasn't sure which side was winning, just yet. Jennifer had her arms crossed and was shaking her head, stalwartly opposed to the whole idea. Reed... Reed looked like he believed it.

A commotion at the front doors. Steve tensed up, suddenly sure someone had overheard them, had discovered their secret. But the doors swung open to reveal Clint rushing in. For a split-second Steve though the expression of disbelief on his face was one of horror, born of the conversation they just had. But no: it was happy. It was disbelief, and shock, but it was _happy_.

Clint ran over to Steve and grabbed his arm when he was only half-out of his seat, practically bowling him over in his excitement. “He's alive!”

Steve frowned. “What?” Zemo? Obadiah? Johnny Storm?

“Natasha's with him! We found him, down in the prisons. They did some shit to him, but he's _alive_ , Steve!”

 _Natasha's with him_.

Before Steve knew what he was doing, he was out in the halls with Clint, running after him, following him out the doors of the palace and into the city. The rest of the people from the meeting were following him, so Steve registered in the back of his mind. His main focus was on Clint and on the pounding of his heartbeat in his ears, a heartbeat that sounded like a name he didn't dare voice out loud. Not yet.

Clint led them to a building maybe two blocks out from city center. It was a research facility of some kind, labs and the like. Steve winced and glanced back at Tony, who brought up the tail of the procession. He wasn't looking around too carefully. Steve wondered if this was where Johnny had died, if Tony recognized it, but knew he couldn't ask with Reed right there.

“Down in the basements,” Clint explained excitedly as they ran through the halls. “We hadn't gotten around to checking them because we couldn't get past the security. Even after we brought the defense tower down, there was still plenty of stuff like this, off the grid, on their own power and security systems. We've been working through them pretty steadily: there's plenty of people here with some crazy technical knowledge. Gotta say, you sure know how to inspire the right people to your cause. But we just got this one open this morning. And... well.”

They reached a heavy steel door, the entrance to some sort of lab. The door was winched half-open. It was through there that Clint led them, into a room filled with computer servers and lab equipment the likes of which Steve had zero understanding. At the far end was a series of three or four plexiglass windows, floor-to-ceiling ones that served more as walls to rooms than windows, save for their transparency. It was in the closest one on the right that Clint led them.

Inside, Natasha was seated on a small single bed, drilled into the wall and hanging maybe two feet off the ground. Beside her was the one person Steve needed back at his side more than anyone right now.

“Bucky!”

Steve flung himself into Bucky's arms, who luckily grabbed him right back and hugged him twice as tight. Steve sobbed into Bucky's neck, mind swimming with confusion but heart happy to hold on and let it be, unquestioningly. Bucky was back, Bucky had been brought back to him, and it didn't matter that they were just some pixels on a screen for some scientist to observe. Bucky was here, Bucky was real enough, and everything would be okay. For the next ten minutes or so, at least.

When Steve pulled back his cheeks were wet, but Bucky's were too, so it was okay. Steve laughed and knocked his head against Bucky's, then kept laughing like he couldn't stop. He shoved at Bucky's shoulders, then his chest. Then he grabbed him by the head and shook him again. “I thought you were _dead_ , you asshole!” Steve chastised him.

Bucky rolled his eyes and ran his fingers through his hair. It was longer now, much longer, like he hadn't gotten a haircut since Steve had last seen him. “Yeah, well: kinda thought I was, too.”

“What the hell _happened_?”

Bucky glanced over Steve's shoulder at that, prompting Steve to turn around and look behind him. The rest of his friends had gathered in the doorway and just outside the tiny room, cramming together to try and see what Steve was up to.

Bucky nodded at the group in the doorway. “We can have this conversation outside my seven by seven room, if the peanut gallery wants to listen in.”

Said peanut gallery stepped back, enough for Bucky, Natasha, and Steve to leave the room. They resettled in the main lab, each person grabbing a stool or chair. Tony stood off in a corner, arms crossed over his chest as he leveled Bucky with a studied glare.

Bucky didn't seem to notice Tony's animosity, or if he did he made no indication of it. Instead, he grabbed Steve's elbow and held him back for a second, pulling him close.

“Hey. The things they did... I know something. Something big. I'm not sure if your guys want to hear it.”

Steve's heart dropped. For some reason it hadn't occurred to him that Bucky would know, or that he would have to break the news to him. Steve was still having a hard time getting used to the idea of having to separate his friends into people who knew versus people who didn't, and further subdivide the latter group into people who needed to know and people who shouldn't be told. Steve wasn't much for subterfuge: the whole thing was already giving him a headache.

But when Steve lifted his head to look into Bucky's eyes, he read the truth in them. The despair, the horror. The hope that it wasn't true, that Steve would be able to talk him out of it. Guilt threatened to overwhelm Steve, that he couldn't fix this for Bucky. Couldn't do this miracle for him, when Bucky had already performed the miracle of being alive for Steve.

“We know,” Steve confirmed. He glanced around the room. “Well, Clint and Natasha don't. Tony and I found out when we took the city. We were just getting around to telling some others today.”

“Natasha knows,” Bucky told Steve.

Clint straightened on his perch on top of a lab counter. “Knows what? Wait, am I the last person to know something? Aw, no. Tell me! What's the big secret?”

While Steve was vacillating yet again on how to phrase such a delicate revelation, Bucky stepped up and explained things to Clint. Bucky appeared to have about the same understanding of the situation as Steve did, and less than Tony. That at least was comforting: Steve hated feeling the dumb man out, which he did whenever Tony started spewing his jargon, and especially so when a guy like Reed was around to actually _understand_ it.

Clint took the news pretty well.

“ _Fuck this_!”

Clint threw a beaker against a wall, shattering it. “ _Fuck everything_! Let's... Let's fuck their shit up, what the _fuck_. What's the point?! What are we even _doing_ here?! We took this whole place for nothing, my friends fucking _died_ to take this place, and now you're telling me they were never even alive? That I'm not alive? _Fuck_ that! I'm taking this down! I'm gonna... I'm gonna...”

Tony stepped forward at that, eyes flashing. “You're going to sit your ass down, Barton, and shut up. Because if our actions become too obvious, our knowledge too widespread, we get shut down.”

“ _Who. Cares_?!” Clint screeched. “We don't even _exist_ , we-”

Tony grabbed Clint by the throat and stared him down: no mean feat, considering Clint had an inch or two on him. “I exist. Maybe you don't, but I sure as fuck do. And I'm going to continue to exist, which means _you're_ going to sit down and keep your mouth shut about this.”

“Tony-” Steve started forward. He wasn't moving to protect Clint; Clint was fine. Clint was scrappy, and a fighter, and wasn't about to let the end of his known universe or Tony Stark's hand around his throat get him down. Not for more than a couple seconds, anyway. No, Steve was starting for Tony because Tony suddenly seemed _alive_ again. He was affirming his existence in a way that Steve had been certain he didn't have the vitality for, after everything they'd learned.

Tony released Clint after a second more, stalking back to his place on the outskirts of the group.

Steve checked with Clint, just long enough to meet his eyes, before nodding and turning back to Bucky.

Bucky jerked a thumb in Tony's direction. “Tony? As in Tony _Stark_?”

Steve flushed and resisted the urge to rub the back of his head. “Erskine brought us together. After you... After we lost you, and Erskine patched me up, he sent me and Sam packing, on the road to find Tony Stark. He's been a big help. We wouldn't have taken the capital without him.”

Bucky narrowed his eyes at Steve, then turned his scrutiny to Tony. “Right. Well, I guess there's gotta be some benefit to having an arms-dealing slumlord on your side.”

“Bucky.” Steve didn't want to get into it now. Into everything Tony was, and how good he was, and how important he was. But he would if Bucky pressed him.

Luckily, Bucky seemed content to let his animosity go with the single jibe, and shrugged it off with rolling eyes. “Whatever.”

“Why did they tell you?” Steve asked, turning the subject back to what was important.

Bucky snorted. “Tell me? They didn't tell me shit. I found out because of what they did to me.”

“Did to you?”

Natasha was curled up next to Bucky, her hand on his thigh. When Steve asked, it was her Bucky turned to. She nodded and squeezed his thigh reassuringly.

Bucky sighed and stood up. “It's kind of freaky,” Bucky warned. Then he unbuttoned the black and red jacket he was wearing and slipped it off.

Steve gasped, but it was Tony who pushed forward first.

“Your arm-”

Bucky shrugged, both shoulders bobbing up and down. His left arm glowed blue as it moved, shining networks of blue beneath his skin.

“Yeah,” Bucky sighed.

“It's a quantum computer,” Tony said. A spark lit in his eyes, the first of its kind Steve had seen for a week. It made Steve suddenly feel calmer. Tony was excited again. Tony was paying attention again; he wasn't just waiting to die. If Tony was thinking again, that meant they might be alright. They might beat this—whatever that meant.

Bucky grumbled as Tony poked and prodded at his arm, turning it this way and that. At one point Tony had his nose shoved in Bucky's armpit. Though Tony didn't seem to notice, Bucky certainly did. His face scrunched up and mouth twitched as he fought hard to suppress laughter. Steve grinned. Bucky was ticklish—he knew that. This was Bucky. This was _his_ Bucky.

“I guess they were running some experiments with, uh, interfaces or something,” Bucky explained. “I don't really know. I'm not exactly a science geek. But they did this to my arm, then they'd jack me into this bank of computers against the wall there, and they'd have me talk to it. It's how I learned we aren't real. Because the computer knew, and it told me.”

Steve stepped forward and nodded at Bucky's arm. “Can I?”

Bucky shrugged and held out his arm. “Knock yourself out.”

Gingerly Steve lifted Bucky's arm, examining it much less intensively than Tony had. Steve turned to the man, who was hovering over his shoulder as he prodded at Bucky. “It's like yours,” Steve pointed out needlessly.

“Just about,” Tony confirmed. “I guess it took them this long to replicate what I did. Piece it together from the notes I left behind and the equipment I used.”

“So me and Tony Stark got a connection?” Bucky asked with a skeptical look at Tony. “Great.”

Steve frowned. “Tony's the one who invented that quantum computer in the first place.”

“Oh, so I've got him to thank for my shiny new nightlight?"

“You've got him to thank for us finding you at all!” Steve pointed out. “Tony was the one who got me in to see the Fates, who gave me the demographic and schematic information we used to mount an attack on this city. Tony was the one who brought me to Jennifer's felon ghetto, where I stopped a riot and first got everyone's attention. Tony gave me jobs that kept me moving towards this, introduced me to the people who would eventually led not only the attack on the city, but also organize the distraction uprisings throughout the ghettos to draw the sentinels away. Tony knew how to make this bigger. Without Tony, I'd still be some kid in Brooklyn, barely making it back from supply runs alive. With Tony, I took down the walls of New Versailles.”

“Fat good that did,” Clint grumbled.

Hopping off his stool, Bucky grabbed Steve's arm and tugged him away. He glanced over his shoulder at Tony almost the whole time. Once they were out of earshot of the rest of the group, Bucky asked: “You fucking this guy?”

Steve gaped, scandalized. “What?” That wasn't an answer.

Bucky gave him a flat look like he knew _exactly_ what Steve was doing. “Seriously. Tony Stark. You're fucking _the_ Tony Stark? The smuggler? The slumlord? The black market kingpin. _You're_ fucking _him_.”

Steve flushed and did his best not to think about the fact that, the one time they _had_ , it'd been the other way around.

“I just told you who he was, and it wasn't any of those things,” Steve reminded Bucky.

Snorting, Bucky shook his head in disbelief. “You know, I always figured you had bad taste.”

Steve rolled his eyes as he and Bucky headed back to the group. Loud enough to be overheard, Steve announced: “Well, we all can't land someone as beautiful as Natasha.”

Natasha snorted as Bucky sat down beside her again, but shot Steve a pleased little look in spite of herself.

“So what can you do with it?” Sam asked. “And, by the way man: good to see you.”

Bucky grinned. “You too.” Turning his arm around, Bucky peered at it speculatively. “As for the glowing arm: not sure. They hooked me up to that server wall over there, just kinda stuck my arm in the slot. And I'd sit there and I could read what was happening in the computer through my hand. Like braille, except in a language I could understand. Definitely not in binary or anything.”

“It'd be in java or lisp, more likely,” Tony mumbled to himself. His fingers were drumming rhythmically on his chest as he thought. After a moment he asked: “And you figured out the world was a simulation through this? How?”

“The questions they had me asking were stuff like 'What were the original parameters of the simulation' and 'how long is the simulation supposed to run for' or whatever. Eventually, while they were coming up with new questions for me to ask, I asked one of my own. Turns out it was the right one.”

“You believed it?” Sam asked.

Bucky shrugged, his eyes downcast. “When I'm hooked up to that thing, I know. It was like being hooked into someone's brain. You know if they're lying. I read it in the code, the answer to my question. It's true.”

Sam shook his head. “But... why couldn't this all be a trick? A psych experiment. They _tell you_ you're helping them answer some questions. But really, all the answers are already planted, and the real experiment is seeing what you do when you're told the world is some... computer game. I mean, come on.” Sam glanced around the room, looking for an ally. “A computer simulation? Really? The _whole world_. Us?”

Tony licked his lips, not paying Sam much mind. “Bucky: you said you could read the computer? That it gave you answers the researchers didn't know?”

Bucky nodded. “Yeah. That mean something?”

Then Tony proved that he _had_ been listening to Sam, because he turned on him and declared: “What you said: not quite accurate. The world is a simulation. The whole damn universe is one. But maybe _we're_ not.”

“Tony?” Steve asked, taking a cautious step towards him.

Tony's eyes were gleaming with that spark Steve had grown to love about them. His fingers drummed on his chest. “I need some time to think. But maybe don't go jumping off the highest skyscraper in the city just yet. Give me the chance to come up with a plan.”

“You think there even is a plan to come up with at this point?” Sam grumbled. It seemed he was finally accepting the reality, or unreality, of their situation.

But Tony was _thinking_. His brow was furrowed and his fingers drumming, drumming, drumming at his chest. It was the most reassuring sight Steve could have wished for.

“If there is one, I'll find it,” Tony promised.

* * *

Later that evening, Steve left Bucky and Natasha with a bone-cracking hug and a kiss to the cheek, respectively. Bucky had opted to stay with Natasha for now rather than find his own rooms in the city. Steve had tucked his hands in his pockets and left them to reunite, then took off down the dark halls of the capital palace on his own. His footsteps echoed loud around him as he walked, steady yet uncertain, over the marble floors.

He was two rooms down for his own when a door across the hall opened up and Tony's head popped out. “Steve.” Tony hurried out of his room, and Steve let his steps slow to a stop.

“Tony. Have you figured something out?” Steve winced the second the words were out of his mouth. He didn't want Tony to feel undue pressure, feel like they were all waiting on him. They had Reed, another intelligent mind who could help them work on the problem. Everything didn't have to fall to Tony.

But Tony waved the comment away, not seeming too hurt by it. “It's been a few hours, Steve. Coming up with a new model of physics is going to take longer than that. That's not what I came to talk to about, anyway.”

Steve frowned. “What is it? You know I'll help in whatever way I can. Tell me what to do and I'll do it.”

“Funny you should avail me of your services...” Tony drawled. Steve tensed up. Oh. He knew _that_ look.

“ _Tony_ ,” Steve chided.

Tony rolled his eyes. “What? The first night in over a week that I'm finally sick of going to bed alone, that I don't feel like disappearing down a bottle or up my own ass, and you put the brakes on this before I even get a word out?”

Steve ran a hand through his hair. “Sorry. What were you going to say?”

“I was going to point out that you've got a pattern.”

“Pattern?”

“Of kissing me just before the heat of battle and then giving me the cold shoulder afterwards.”

Steve frowned. “ _You_ kissed _me_ before the fight against the sentinels in your ghetto. And actually, you were the one to ask me to come to bed before the attack on the capital!”

Tony grimaced. “Okay, yeah, I'd noticed _that_ part of the pattern too, but for the sake of my ego I was opting to ignore it. Thanks for pointing it out.”

Steve winced. Twice in two minutes now he'd managed to say exactly the wrong thing to Tony. He really needed to learn to watch his mouth.

“I'm sorry. It's not that I'm not interested, Tony. You know I am. I...” Steve flushed and looked down, then realized maybe that wasn't the safest place for his eyes right now so turned his face to the right. Mumbling to some draperies on the wall, Steve declared: “I made it pretty obvious how much I. I was. _Interested_.”

Tony wasn't nearly as coy as Steve. “Making a guy come isn't exactly a ringing endorsement. A strong breeze can make someone as young as you come.”

“I'm not that young,” Steve grumbled.

“And if you don't want to fuck me, that's fine. You really need to work on your signals, but it's fine.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Tony, it's not that. I like you. I want to be with you. I loved being with you, the one time we had the chance. But how can you think about sex right now? How can you think of anything physical?”

“You were the one who said life is still worth living,” Tony pointed out.

“It is, but...”

“You're so quick to defend me to your friends and loved ones, but the second we're alone it's like you can't even stand to look at me.”

“Because I look at you and I see numbers! I look at you and I see a stream of data, ones and zeroes. I see the same thing when I look down at myself, at my own flesh and bone. How can you want to go _on_ , how can you still want to touch me and kiss me when we're all just some blips on a computer somewhere, some bored engineer probably watching a thousand of our years past in a minute.”

“Because we're going to find a way _out_ , Steve! I couldn't see it before, I admit it. For the past week I've been wallowing in self-pity, shutting you and everything out. But what Bucky said they were doing to him got me thinking. If we can communicate with the outside world, there's hope. It means we're conscious, it means we're real in a way that's real _outside_ of this simulation. I want to fuck you because I am _conscious_ , because you are _conscious_ , because even if our skin and blood and sweat and tears are all fabricated, our minds are our own. _Your_ mind is your own. And that's what I love-” Tony cut himself off, choking on that last word. Steve stared at Tony with wide eyes.

Tony looked away, eyes focusing on the expensive marble beneath his feet as he shuffled awkwardly. “Well, I mean. I should have known.”

Steve trembled as he took a tentative step forward, towards Tony. “Known what?”

When Tony glanced back up at Steve, some of his trademark smirk was back. “That we're not real. Our bodies, at least. I mean: come on. Look at you.” Tony gestured up and down at Steve. “Only a computer could have made something that damn perfect. I thought you looked like photoshop.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Shut up.”

“No, really! I mean, it's obvious someone used a dodge tool to sculpt your abs, blur brush smoothed out your pores...”

“Shut up, Tony.” Steve shoved playfully at Tony, who arrested his movements by grabbing his hand and refusing to let go.

“Make me.”

Steve's breath caught in his throat. Tony really was handsome, even if it was unreal in some way. It felt real. Tony felt real. And _he_ was real: his mind, his feelings, his decisions were real.

Steve reached out and grabbed ahold of Tony's wrist with his free hand. Then he pulled Tony to him and into his rooms. This time they were able to fall into a bed together.

 


	14. Miss Atomic Bomb

 

Sunlight filtered in through Steve's open curtains as he crawled back into bed, a small feast piled onto the tray in his hands. He slipped onto the bed, balancing the tray in one hand as he tugged the blankets up with his other, so he could slide his legs back under them. [He managed the whole process without disturbing his bedmate, who had his face pressed firmly into the pillow, mouth open and drool pooling out of it.](http://everybodyilovedies.tumblr.com/post/97843014547/ninnin003-i-recently-read-data-is-king-by) Steve smiled fondly down at the sight. It was early days, obviously, if Steve was finding Tony's drool attractive.

Settling with his back propped up against the expansive headboard, Steve started picking at the delicious spread he'd liberated from the palace kitchen.

Apparently the scent of fresh coffee was enough to rouse Tony from his slumber, because his head perked up from the pillow before his eyes even opened. “Coffee?”

Steve smiled and picked up a cup from the tray as Tony slid himself into a semi-upright position. “Coffee,” he confirmed.

Tony took the cup with a grateful moan, sipping at it in long, happy draughts. Steve sat back with his french toast, munching contentedly as he watched Tony slowly awaken to the world. It was a good sight. One Steve could have gotten used to, one he could have seen himself happy to have every morning for the rest of his life and be a fully satisfied man. Before he learned the truth.

“So I was thinking about some plans going forward-” Steve started.

Tony moaned and headbutted Steve in the arm. “No,” he grumbled. He took a long drink from his mug before headbutting him again. “No. Coffee. Food. Sex. Sleep. Coffee. Then maybe plans.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “We have to-”

Setting his mug down decisively on the tray, Tony disappeared under the covers in a mop of unruly hair. A moment later, Steve's eyes went wide and he quickly deposited the tray over on the nightstand next to his side of the bed.

Planning could wait at least thirty minutes.

Steve collapsed back to his pillows an hour later, panting noisily. Tony was trembling on the sheets next to him, body twitching as he lay there, doing his best to sink into the mattress.

Steve's head lolled lazily to the side as he relaxed into his pillow. Reaching one hand out, he stroked at Tony's sweaty hair. “Alright?”

“Ungf,” Tony mewled.

After resting for a moment until his breathing calmed down, Steve rolled over to his side and reached out to grab at his breakfast tray. The eggs were cold by now, and the toast a little bit limp from the butter he had smeared on it, but it was still good food. Steve spread some jam on toast before nudging Tony and passing the toast off to him. Tony groaned but took it, munching on it without sitting up from his sprawl across the bed.

“You're getting crumbs everywhere,” Steve pointed out with no vitriol.

Tony flipped him the finger and kept shoving toast into his mouth with zero regard for the mess he was making. Steve found himself smiling fondly down at him. Yeah, this honeymoon phase wasn't going to last forever. But it sure was nice while they were in it.

_Save us, Steve Rogers_ .

“You know, I've been thinking...”

“Don't do that,” Tony mumbled. Then he reached out and grabbed at the tray over Steve's stomach. “Give me more food.”

“Oh, now you're hungry.” But Steve smiled and brought the tray over to the bed so he could place it between them.

As Tony gobbled up some bacon from the plate, Steve continued his thought. “Anyway, I was thinking: we should bring the Fates in on this.”

“No way.”

“I think they knew something,” Steve explained.

Tony wiped his fingers on the sheets before he grabbed for Steve's coffee. Steve let him have it—he'd gotten it for Tony, anyway. He preferred the orange juice. “I'm sure they knew something.”

“They why don't you want to bring them in?”

Tony made a face at the cold coffee, but kept drinking it nonetheless. “Because they knew something.”

“You're just upset they knew something before you did,” Steve pointed out.

“No. I'm disgusted that they knew something this world-shattering and did nothing.”

Steve considered this. “They gave me a USB with everything we needed to get into New Versailles. Pietro told you this would happen. They kept us together, made us work together. It seems like they were working to get us to this point, in their own way.”

“They're human, just like we are. They're stuck in this simulation, same as you and me. They're not higher, or better, or superior. They're not some demi-gods of the simulated reality. The least they could have done was given us a head's up. Shared some information.”

Steve sighed and ran a hand through Tony's hair, smoothing it down where he could. Tony huffed a little approving noise and shifted himself closer into Steve, snuggling up.

“Maybe they didn't know if they could trust us. Maybe they didn't know if telling us would be too much, and cause the people running the simulation to put an end to us.”

Tony shifted discontentedly beneath Steve's hand. Before he could reply, there was a knock on the door. Steve and Tony glanced at each other, wondering. Then a voice called through the door: “Hey, Steve? You awake?”

“Yeah, Sam!” Steve called back. “One minute!”

Steve shimmied his way out of bed, leaving Tony sprawling and munching on some fruit from the tray. Searching around the room, Steve managed to find his jeans tossed over a chair in the corner. He slipped them on sans underwear and padded over, bare-footed and bare-chested. He ignored the wolf-whistle Tony gave him as he opened the door.

Steve opened the door just enough to stick his head through it, trying to block the view of the bed with his body and the rest of the door itself. “Yeah, Sam. What's up?”

Sam's eyes immediately narrowed at Steve. His gaze drifted down to what little of Steve's torso he could see. Steve fought the urge to move his body as much behind the door as he could and waited for Sam to speak.

“Good night?”

“Sam.”

“What?! Just asking: did you have a good night? That's a normal question to ask.”

Steve sighed and knocked his head against the door. “ _Sam_ .”

“Alright, alright. You've got visitors. Tony too, though I guess maybe I shouldn't waste my time knocking on his door.”

“I'll let him know,” Steve promised with what might have been close to a straight face.

Until Tony shouted from the bed: “Thanks, Sammy!”

“Tell whoever it is I'll be out in five minutes,” Steve told Sam. Then he shut the door on him and turned to glare at Tony. Tony just grinned and stretched on the bed.

“Five minutes?” Tony purred as Steve stalked back over to the bed. Tony batted his eyelashes. “That doesn't seem like enough time- mmph!”

Steve managed to shut Tony up pretty effectively by kissing him. He brought a hand up to Tony's neck, so that when he broke the kiss, Steve was able to keep Tony where he wanted him. Steve thumbed consolingly at Tony's neck as he tried to move in for another kiss but Steve held him back. “Get dressed,” Steve told him.

Tony pouted, but rolled out of bed when Steve left him. They got dressed with minimal groping, and were out the door in the promised five minutes. Tony grabbed two apples from the breakfast tray and tucked one into his pocket, munching on the second one as they stepped out of Steve's bedroom together. They headed down the long halls to the main steps of the palace, where Steve assumed Sam was keeping these unknown visitors.

“Who do you think it is?” Tony asked Steve.

“Jessica, Luke, and Danny?” Steve suggested. “Though maybe that's wishful thinking. They're busy in their ghetto, cleaning up and rebuilding the train lines.”

The apple snapped crisply as Tony bit a hunk off it. “Don't you think Sam would have said if it was them?”

Steve frowned and cocked his head over at Tony. “Well, who do you think it is?”

The apple snapped again as Tony took another bite. “I have my theories,” he mumbled grimly.

They stepped outside together, the bright morning light forcing Steve to squint and reflexively lift a hand to shield his eyes. When his vision adjusted, he was confronted with four figures standing on the steps to the palace, Sam making it five standing off to the side.

Tony threw his apple core at the tallest of the four. Pietro just dodged it with that rippling, effervescent speed of his.

Wanda stepped forward, cradling something in her arms. It was wrapped in a silky red cloth, so that Steve couldn't catch sight of what it was. The women and Pietro looked the worse for wear. Wanda's curly red hair was tied up in a scarf, though several frizzy curls had escaped and were kissing her cheeks. Carol was dressed in cargos, work boots, and a grey t-shirt, long blonde hair piled up in a ponytail on top of her head. Jessica had on a blood-red coat, two sizes too big in the shoulders. Her black hair was dirty and matted, tangled into the beginnings of dreadlocks.

“Good morning, Steve Rogers. Tony Stark.”

“Good morning,” repeated Carol.

“Good morning,” repeated Jessica.

Steve rubbed his head. “Could we drop the speaking in rounds?” he asked. He figured the time for bowing and scraping was past. Like Tony had said: these women most likely knew  _something_ of the secret New Versailles was hiding, and told them nothing.

Carol groaned with relief, cracking her neck loudly. “We'll do our best. Ever since we lost our link-up it's been on and off.”

Jessica leaned her elbow on Carol's shoulder. “Can we get some food? Pietro is a terrible manservant.”

“Maybe because I'm not your manservant,” Pietro sneered.

“Pietro, hold him.” Wanda passed the bundle in her arms over to Pietro, who took it without question. Then he flushed bright red as Tony smirked at him. What ensued between them was a truly magnificent face-pulling competition.

“Link up?” Steve asked, trying to bring the conversation back on topic.

Wanda looked sorrowful, her auburn curls blowing sadly around her face. “We had a connection with the simulation. Access to the metadata that overlaid everything. The Vision was the program we wrote, to help us interface with the data.”

Carol moved away from Jessica and over to Wanda, wrapping her hands comfortingly around Wanda's shoulders. “We lost our connection to the metadata the day you invaded. It must have been something you blew. The Vision shut down. We don't know if he's still alive in there or...”

“Alive? In where?” Steve asked, confused. Unfamiliar terms were being tossed out like they were standard parlance too quickly for him to keep up.

Pietro dragged himself away from his face-pulling contest with Tony and walked over to Steve, arms held out. Wanda stepped forward and gently pried the cloth away from the bundle in Pietro's arms. Steve frowned down at what was revealed. It was some kind of computer box, a sleek rectangle of red and green metal that looked maybe a little worse for wear after its journey from its ghetto to New Versailles.

Steve glanced up to Wanda. “This is the Vision?”

Wanda looked a little bit broken, gazing down at the garish box. Carol kept her hands on her shoulders, offering her support. “This was the Vision. We lost our interface that we used to interact with him. We think he's still alive. We hope.” Wanda's voice trailed off helplessly.

Steve glanced over to Tony, hoping his expression made it clear that he was completely and utterly lost. Luckily, Tony seemed to understand his distress, because he came over and peered down at the box with him. After a moment he glanced up, squinting out at the city coming awake.

“Let's bring this inside,” Tony suggested. “Then we can share information openly.”

“And we can get you four fed,” Steve added, mindful of Carol's request. He looked from person to person, taking in the state of disarray the small travel party was in.

Wanda smiled gratefully. “Thank you. It's been a chaotic week.”

As the party headed inside, Steve grabbed Sam's elbow. “You don't have to stick around for this,” he told him. “I'm sure you have better things to be doing.”

Sam shook his head. “No way. I still don't believe half the shit I heard you and Bucky and Stark claiming yesterday. I wanna hear it from these nuts.”

Steve pressed his lips together and glanced over at the Fates and Pietro. Wanda was still cradling the box, the Vision, in her arms protectively. Carol and Jessica flanked her, like a herd of lionesses. Steve turned back to Sam.

“They're not nuts. They're-”

Sam waved his hand. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, I know. I still wanna hear this. I'm asking Rhodey to bring us some food now.” Sam tapped at his ear meaningfully.

They went inside the palace, to an interior courtyard that was surrounded by interior rooms. No one who didn't already know the secret would stumble upon them here. Steve stamped down on the guilt that was churning in his gut at the satisfaction that thought caused. They weren't keeping this secret from the people forever. Just for now. Just until they had some sort of plan for staying alive. For keeping _everyone_ alive.

They settled into the courtyard, Tony, Steve, and Sam on one side, Pietro, Wanda, Carol, and Jessica on the other. Wanda continued to cradle the Vision in her arms.

Tony crossed his arms as Steve and Sam settled in on either side of him. “Alright. From the beginning. Full disclosure.”

Wanda nodded, fingers flexing around the green and red computer casing. “We'll tell you as much as we can.”

“First of all, tell me about the Vision.”

“We made him,” Wanda started.

“To deal with the massive amount of information we had coming in,” Carol continued.

“To sort through,” Jessica finished.

Steve rubbed his head. “Rounds, ladies.”

Carol and Jessica both scowled and looked down to their sides. Wanda shook her head, red curls bobbing around her cheeks. “Sorry. It's habit. When we were hooked into the Vision, had all that information streaming through us, it was hard to maintain singular identities. We've been doing that for so long that sometimes we slip into it, even though we're not connected.”

Steve couldn't imagine such a thing, but he nodded his understanding anyway.

“The Vision,” Tony prompted.

“He was originally designed for data-mining,” Wanda explained. “We made his algorithms self-modifiable, so that eventually he could reach a point where he would adapt to new data, and create better search algorithms than we were capable of writing.”

“So you created an AI,” Tony guessed.

Carol nodded. “Vision learned way beyond what we were capable of programming. He was able to sort through the data and filter it to us in a way we could understand.”

“After a fashion,” Jessica cut in.

“What were you tapping into, though?” Steve asked. He glanced over at Tony, knowing he was probably asking a stupid question. He was wholly out of his depth, but he still wanted to have _some_ handle on the situation.

Wanda explained. “We built our house on top of a lab.”

“A university, we think,” Carol said.

Wanda nodded. “They had some equipment. Super collider. Lasers. A computer.”

Jessica flipped a lock of hair over her shoulder. “Honestly, we don't know what half the stuff was for.”

Carol shrugged. “We're not actually scientists. Just lucky enough to find it all, and smart enough to figure out what we had.”

“And how to program a functioning AI,” Tony pointed out.

Wanda shrugged. “We already had the labs and computers. The hardware was there. And there were plenty of resources to teach ourself the software, once we were able to get the energy to run the equipment.”

“So you're telling me you stumbled across an advanced computer scientist lab, then decided to make an AI with all that tech?” Tony asked.

Wanda shook her head. “No. We found the lab, then we started sorting through the data ourselves. That's when we realized what we were reading.”

“You guys figured it out too, didn't you?” Carol asked.

Tony crossed his arms and stuck out his jaw a little bit. “Maybe.”

Jessica rolled her eyes. “The world's a simulation.”

“Whole damn universe is,” Carol grumbled.

“But you know that now,” Wanda prompted.

Sam groaned. “Not them, too.”

Steve nodded grimly, ignoring Sam. “Yeah. We know. Some of us. We haven't figured out what to do with telling the people.”

“You mustn't!” Wanda started forward, Carol and Jessica taking a step with her, guarding her. Wanda grabbed hold of Steve's wrist with one hand, cradling the Vision in her other. “You mustn't, Steve. If they know that we know, it will be the end of us.”

“According to the Vision,” Jessica added. Carol shot her a warning look, to which Jessica rolled her eyes and huffed. “What?! It's true.” Jessica turned to Steve and Tony, explaining: “The Vision was the one who decided we were better off not telling anyone. He said according to the data, if all the people found out, the assholes running the simulation would end up shutting us down.”

“It's because we'd all start acting different,” Carol explained, defending the Vision's assessment. “No point in simulating a simulation that knows it's a simulation. All the data you'd get-”

“-is about a world that knows it's a simulation, yeah, we know,” Steve finished for her with a sigh. So they had independent confirmation by an AI for Tony's theories. That was less than heartening.

Tony explained to Jessica: “We've come to the same conclusion. And so had the people who lived in New Versailles, going back to the first people who figured out the secret. Chances are...” he shrugged. Jessica frowned and looked away, unhappy with the confirmation.

“So you figured out the world was a simulation,” Tony prompted.

Wanda nodded. “And then we built the Vision. We couldn't read through all the information that was there, on everyone in the world. Even with the four of us working at it all day every day. It was just too much. We needed a search algorithm.”

“So you built the Vision,” Tony finished for her.

Carol nodded. “Took years. Like we said: we're not programmers.”

Jessica shrugged. “But we only had to make it smart enough.”

“Smarter than you,” Tony mused. “But you three showed up on the scene, what, almost ten years ago? And if it took you that long to program the Vision...”

Jessica shrugged. “We found the lab when we were kids. Thirteen, fifteen. Carol was eleven.”

Steve winced. “You were out on your own? All of you?”

Carol scowled. “Me and Jess had each other. Bailed on some bad situations, and looked out for each other. Wanda and Pietro were the same.” Carol smiled softly over at Wanda. “We looked out for each other, the four of us. It wasn't bad.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Heartwarming. Okay, so then what? What else did you figure out?”

Carol made a face over at Tony as Wanda took a step back from Steve, both arms returning to hug the Vision to her chest. “Not much more than you. We could read the metadata, see what was happening across the simulation, but we couldn't contact the outside.”

Tony's eyebrows raised. “Did you try?”

Carol wobbled her hand back and forth. “Kind of. We tried to see if we could try. Didn't want to get in over our heads, or bring the wrong kind of attention down on us.”

“Visz said it was a no-go,” Jessica finished, striking her hands out, palms down.

Tony hesitated, glancing over at Steve. Steve knew what he was thinking: Bucky. And if they should tell the women about him. Steve just shrugged back at Tony. This wasn't his area of expertise, not by a long shot. If Tony wanted to share information with the Fates, then that was his discretion, not Steve's.

After a moment Tony nodded and turned back to the women. “We might have a way of talking to the program. And the outside. Maybe.”

The three women's eyes widened. “Really?” Wanda breathed.

Carol stepped forward, defensive. “Have you been holding out on us? How? Show us.”

Tony held up his hands in his own defense. “Hey, hey, hey! No one's holding out. We just found Steve's best friend Bucky alive yesterday. Apparently he's got a hook-up that allowed him to talk to the program. We think. We haven't tested it yet.”

Wanda's eyes lit up. “Really? How?” she asked, at the same time that Jessica mentioned:

“Oh yeah, you found him.”

Steve glared at her. Jessica shrugged, entirely unashamed. “What? We could read the metadata, remember. Could see everyone that existed. Bucky was still alive when you showed up at our place.”

“And you didn't think to _mention_ that?” Steve asked.

Jessica shrugged. “You found him, didn't you? No harm done.”

“Well then why don't you know that he can communicate with the outside?” Sam asked. Steve blinked. That was a good question.

Wanda shook her head, gripping at the Vision. “We couldn't tell what he was doing, if he really was interacting with something outside the simulation. And we weren't focused on him.”

“Even with the Vision, it was way too much information,” Carol explained.

“The only reason we glanced at him was because we were researching you.” Jessica pointed at Steve.

“How can Bucky access the outside?” Wanda prompted, bringing the conversation back on track.

Tony grimaced, glancing over at Steve, like he was seeking his permission again. Steve just nodded. Not like they were going to hold out information just because the Fates had been. That would be petty (though maybe the thought crossed Steve's mind for a _second_ ). Tony shrugged and turned back to the women. “Bucky has a quantum computer in his arm.”

All three women smiled at the same time, expressions lightening and making them all look ten years younger. They _were_ only a few years older than Steve, a few younger than Tony, when you stripped them of all their power and wisdom. It was easy to see now, though it had been less obvious when they had first met.

“A quantum computer? Like yours?” Carol asked.

Tony rubbed at his chest irritably. “Worst kept secret this side of the wall,” he grumbled. “And no: not like mine. Better, because it's already designed to interface with the simulation code, and the outside world. They were hooking him up to some servers and having him read the code out to him, before we took the city.”

A sound to the side of the courtyard made Steve jump and turn, worried some intrepid kid had snuck into the palace. But it was just Rhodey, wheeling in a table covered with a grand spread of food. The Fates and Pietro all looked at the table hungrily, circles around their eyes standing out in sudden sharp relief alongside their cheekbones and gaunt cheeks.

Steve and Sam got to work dragging the benches over to the table as Rhodey brought it to a stop. The Fates and Pietro sat down on one side, Steve, Sam, Tony, and Rhodey on the other. The Fates and Pietro dug into the food eagerly, with little regard for anything resembling table manners. Steve couldn't blame them. He knew what it was like to be that hungry, to have gone too long without food.

Tony held out his hands to Wanda. “Lemme see him.”

Reluctantly Wanda passed the metal box containing the Vision over the table to Tony, who took it with a surprising amount of respect. All three women kept a watchful eye on Tony, even as they ate.

“What happened to him?” Tony asked. He turned the box over in his hands, finger pads sliding across with the soft scrape of skin on metal.

“We saw you two heading for the surveillance system,” Carol said around a mouthful of eggs. “We were watching the whole thing: the battle, the lead-up, the planning.”

A slight pause. Steve glanced up and saw Carol and Jessica smirking at him. The tips of his ears turned red. They couldn't have been watching _that_. Not his night before with Tony. That wold have been just... unethical.

The table rattled, and Jessica and Carol both jolted, while Wanda looked overly pleased with herself. Judging by the way Carol had winced and Jessica was leaning down to rub her ankle, Wanda must have kicked them under the table. Steve nodded to himself. Serves them right.

Wanda continued to explain: “When the surveillance servers blew, there was some feedback our way. Their surveillance systems must have relied on tapping into the same code we were watching with the Vision, or the Vision must have integrated himself partially into New Versailles' surveillance servers... we're honestly not sure. But there was a surge, and then the Vision went dark, and so did our connection to the metadata.”

Carol slurped some powdered milk before adding: “Our computers were fried too—we couldn't even access the metadata using them. We're hoping the Vision was smart enough to save himself somehow, but...”

Tony was nodding to himself, fingernails plucking lightly at the seams on the box. “Right, no way to tell. Alright, I'll see what I can do. If the Vision was as advanced an AI as you guys think, he probably had a back-up of himself somewhere, if not here.”

“Why wouldn't it be on there?” Steve asked. But his eyes were already flickering down to Tony's chest, where the quantum computer was glowing, just faintly visible beneath his shirt.

Tony caught the look and smiled approvingly. “Not enough space. Not unless this is a quantum computer and I don't know it. But if this was his original wheelhouse, or his main one or whatever, it'll probably have some information on there telling us where to find him. If I can find it; if it's not all fried.”

“That's a lot of 'ifs',” Pietro pointed out.

Tony shrugged. “It's the most I can say at this point. But I can bring him back to my room, pop him open, see what sorts of secrets he's keeping. Shouldn't take more than a few hours. After that, I'll have a better idea of what we're dealing with.” Tony glanced at each of the women, and Pietro, in turn. He leaned across the table and told them: “Trust me. You guys have done some wonders with software, but I'm a hardware guy. I'm _the_ hardware guy. If there's a glimmer of your Vision in here, I'll be able to find him. And then I'll be able to find the rest of him and bring him back to you.”

Wanda sighed, the relief palpable on her face. Carol frowned in concern and rubbed Wanda's back, even as she scooped some noodles into her mouth with her other hand. “It wasn't just us three connected up, when we were the Fates,” Carol explained. “It was Vision, too. I'm as used to having him in my head as Wanda or Jessica. We all are.”

Tony nodded. “I understand. Well, I don't, but I do. The Vision's in safe hands with me, don't worry.”

Steve was so focused on making sure that the women and Pietro ate over the next thirty minutes that he didn't realize Carol was falling asleep on Wanda until the woman slipped and almost fell face-first into a pat of meat. Carol flushed and ran a shaky hand through her hair, nudging Wanda away when she tried to look after her.

“Why don't we get you some rooms?” Steve offered. “We have four separate ones, if you want.”

Wanda's hand slipped down to Carol's waist, holding her steady. “Three is fine,” she corrected him. Steve nodded, not following up the information with what was sure to be an invasive question—even if it seemed pretty obvious to him how those rooms would be divvied up.

Tony sucked the last juices out of the apple he had been munching on and tossed the core to the table. “Take a nap, sit down for a minute. It's going to be a while before I have any news on the Vision; even longer before I'll try to hook him up to Bucky's interface, which is what you'll want to be there for.”

Sam and Rhodey stood up. “I'll take you to the rooms,” Sam offered.

As Tony stood up with the Vision, Wanda hesitated, hands reaching out before she pulled them back. “Be careful with him,” Wanda implored. Her thinly-plucked eyebrows folded towards each other in worry.

To Steve's surprise, Tony touched the box gently and nodded, expression betraying nothing other than a deep seriousness for the subject at hand. Immediately after, Steve felt bad for thinking so lowly of Tony. “Of course,” Tony promised Wanda. She smiled gratefully.

When they were alone a few minutes later, hurrying down the halls to Tony's room, Steve had to ask: “Do you really think you can save him?”

Tony burst through is bedroom doors with his usual grandeur. “I think he already saved himself,” Tony announced.

Steve stumbled a little as he entered Tony's room, eyes widening as he took everything in. the place was a mess of lab equipment, cables, wires, monitors, and all sorts of mechanical parts Steve had no hope of identifying. Something was hissing in the corner, red and angry looking. Steve watched with an open mouth as Tony glanced over at it, said “oh,” and then slapped something on top of it. The machine or furnace or whatever it was hissed itself extinguished after a few seconds.

“What was that?” Steve asked, alarmed.

Tony shook his head and waved Steve over to the other side of the room, where he was kicking aside some equipment. “Forgot to turn that off. Industrial soldering iron. Don't worry about it.”

“Tony!”

With a space on the floor cleared, Tony threw himself down in front of a monitor. He gestured up at Steve, who lowered himself down gingerly to the barely cleared space. Something sharp jabbed him, and Steve had to reach behind himself to extricate a... some kind of metal pole with a spiky end, from his lower back. Sighing, Steve tossed the pipe to the side.

“I was kind of distracted by my own self-pity,” Tony pointed out. “You know. World's a simulation. We aren't real.”

“I seem to recall that,” Steve replied dryly.

“And then I was distracted because your buddy Bucky was back. And then I was distracted because what he said about talking to the program meant there was _hope_ , there might be something I can _do_. And then you distracted me with sex-”

“- _I_ distracted _you_ with sex?!” Steve snorted. “Uh, maybe you better check your back-up, Tony, because _my_ memory of last night-”

Tony hushed Steve distractedly, then turned to him out of the blue and pressed a kiss to his lips. To Steve's chagrin, it was just as effective at shutting him up as it was at shutting Tony up.

“What was that-”

Tony hushed Steve again as he carefully pried the casing of the Vision open and his fingers slipped into his innards. “Anyway. Kind of forgot I had the soldering iron on. Palace is still standing, we're alive, no harm done. Now sit there and look like sexy emotional support as I work my genius magic.”

“You're an ass,” Steve sighed, with zero heat.

The corner of Tony's mouth curled up into a self-satisfied little grin. “Yeah, but you love it.”

Steve's stomach swooped. After a long moment he whispered back: “I do.”

Tony gave no sign that he heard Steve's words, which was for the best. Steve settled back and waited as Tony worked. He watched Tony's long, skillful fingers move inside the box, tugging out connections with his fingernails, stripping away wires in the next movement. He glanced around after a second, then tapped Steve's leg. “Hand me that soldering iron,” he directed him with a nod over to Steve's left.

It took Steve a second to find the item in all the mess, but once he did he handed it over to Tony with a warning look. “Remember to turn this one off?” he pleaded.

Tony snorted as he worked, neck and back curved over the box in his lap. “You're such a mother hen.” His fingers pressed something in place, tapping at it with the soldering iron. After a moment he pulled back, satisfied. He glanced over his shoulder back at Steve. “You would have made a great leader. If the revolution had been real.”

Steve grimaced, then shook his head. “It _was_ real. We found out New Versailles' secret. And we're working to fix it, better than any solution they ever came up with. It might be taking a little longer, and be different than the endgame we pictured, but it's still a revolution for the people. We're just still fighting it, even after the walls came down.”

Tony shook his head as he turned back to the monitors in front of him, flicking them on. “It's a shame you'll never get to give _that_ speech. Because it sure did warm my clockwork heart.”

“Stop,” Steve grumbled, nudging Tony. As the monitors flared to life, Steve crawled forward a foot or two so he could look at them just over Tony's shoulder. Tony leaned back against him, body opening up to Steve's presence next to him.

“It's true,” Tony told him. Then he fell silent as he looked at the monitors in front of him, and the information it was displaying.

“Ahhh,” he mumbled to himself. To Steve, he said: “Find me a permanent marker. Or grease pen. Something I can write on this with.”

Steve pushed himself up and got to looking as Tony ripped apart the connection he had just soldered, then got to work soldering a new one. Eventually, beneath a pillow underneath the bed, Steve found a grease pencil. He brought it back to Tony and was thanked with a kiss. Tony Stark's lab assistant: not the worst job Steve had ever held. Not by a long shot.

“See, look,” Tony said after a few minutes. He gestured at a string of numbers on his screen. “This pathway isn't fried. It looks like the Vision set this up as a RAID tower, to protect himself. So I just need to find all the bits that are alive, get them together, and it can run an algorithm to fill in the blanks.”

Steve's mood brightened. “How long will that take?”

Tony shrugged as he bent back over the box. “Oh, like a day, yeah. Not gonna be done in time for dinner, sorry honey.”

“But you _can_ save him?”

Tony nodded as he soldered another connection, then glanced back up at the monitor. He clicked around at something, then bent back over the box. “Oh yeah. Definitely. Like, ninety-five percent definitely. From what I've seen so far, it looks good.”

Steve smiled and sat back. That was good. Wanda—and the others, but Wanda especially—had looked so desperate, so broken, over the loss of this computer program. Steve was happy to hear that Tony could fix it for them.

“Can I ask you something?”

Tony shrugged. “Yeah, shoot, fire away. This isn't taking a lot of my concentration, if that's what you mean,” he reassured Steve.

“Yeah, that's what I was checking.”

“Nope. Easy-peasy over here. Ask away.”

Steve watched Tony's eyes and hands dart between the Vision's box and his own monitors, keyboard, and mouse as he worked, falling into an easy rhythm even after such a short amount of time at it. “You said the Vision probably didn't store himself on here, that only a quantum computer can do that?”

Tony nodded. “Right. The Vision isn't a person, but if he's as advanced as the ladies seem to think he is—and I'm inclined to trust the ladies, since they know their software better than I do, most days—he's going to have a consciousness just as advanced as a human's, if not even more so. Which means just as much space is needed to back all that up. I told you the only way I could back up everything that's me—my DNA, my memories, my brain-states, AKA the closest physical thing I can figure to be the seat of a personality—is if I made a QC and backed it up there. Well, same goes for the Vision. He doesn't have to record DNA for himself, or a lifetime of memories like I have, but he's got something like ten years of memories, not to mention a host of computing algorithms just as advanced as human consciousness. That kind of data takes up a lot of space. If it's not stored on a QC, that is.”

“And how did you know this wasn't a quantum computer?” Steve asked. “Couldn't it have been? They're not always... glowing, necessarily. Are they?”

Tony laughed. “No, they don't all glow. But... well first of all, look inside. See all the circuits?” Tony gestured at different pieces of silicon and metal with his soldering iron, poking at the green computer chips and the almost microscopic filaments running through them. “This is a SSD: solid state device. This is just what they look like, and it's _not_ what a QC looks like. But aside from that...” Tony set the soldering iron aside and hefted the box up, passing it off to Steve. He took it and held it, feeling the weight of it in his hands. “It's heavy, right?” Steve shrugged. It was probably ten pounds. Not _heavy_. But it had a weight to it, sure.

“QC's don't weigh that much,” Tony explained, taking back the Vision from Steve. He picked up the soldering iron and went back to work. “QC's are made up of dozens of atoms. Not billions or trillions. They weigh next to nothing, and I mean that in a very literal sense. They're the smallest things we can build with, so they're the absolute lightest things we can make that aren't just... equations, floating in space. This might have been hiding a QC or something, which I would have seen when I opened it up. But safe bet is, this was a normal hard drive. Handy for telling me where to find the QC back-up, if the Vision has one. If he doesn't, he'll be backed up spread out, over the entire ethernetwork.”

“Can he do that?” Steve asked.

Tony shrugged. “It's what I'd do, if I was a incorporeal consciousness without access to the materials to build myself a QC.”

Steve hesitated for a second. The thought he had was probably a stupid one. He didn't know anything about this quantum mechanics, and Tony certainly was the local expert on it. Whatever Steve was thinking, Tony was sure to have already thought of it, and either dismissed it or taken care of it. Still... “Isn't that what we are?”

Tony frowned and glanced over at him. “What?”

“Isn't that what we are? Incorporeal consciousnesses. We're lines of data in a simulation, but I mean... isn't Vision basically that to us? And you're treating him like he's alive, and so's Wanda and Carol and Jessica... So if he's alive, we're alive. And if he can be saved...” _Save us, Steve Rogers_! “...maybe so can we.”

A strange light was forming in Tony's eyes as he listened to Steve. After a second, he tilted his head to the side and asked: “Do you still have that USB the Fates gave you?”

Steve nodded. “Sure. It's in my coat, back in my bedroom. Why?”

Tony twirled the soldering iron between his fingers. “Back-up. I've got one, but nobody else does. This box here is the Vision's roadmap to his saved copy. Maybe we can use that USB of yours the same way.”

“To what?” Steve asked, confused.

“To save everyone.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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	15. Flesh and Bone

 

Bucky was waiting in the lab by the time Steve and Tony arrived, looking distinctly uncomfortable to be back down there. Natasha was at his side, not quite holding his hand, but with their arms overlapped like Bucky was seconds away from needing it. Steve strode over to Bucky and embraced him, patting his back firmly. Bucky pressed his nose into Steve's neck and breathed.

“You okay?” Steve whispered. He pulled back enough so he could look at Bucky, but kept his arms firmly on Bucky's shoulders and back.

Bucky tried for a grin but it came out as a grimace. He looked around the lab, eyes landing on Tony for a second before pulling away. “No. But I'll live.”

Steve frowned. “Hey, come on. I don't want to put you through anything that's going to upset you. Say the word, and Tony'll figure out another way to link up to the program. Probably link himself up, knowing him.”

But Bucky shook his head, jaw strong. “No. I'll do it. I'm already modified to get plugged in as it is—who knows how long it'd take Stark to figure out how to do that to himself.”

“If it's too upsetting-”

“It's fine. It's fine,” Bucky breathed, like he was trying to reassure himself. He smiled at Steve again, almost managing it this time. “You're here. Natasha's here. It'll be better that way. It doesn't hurt or anything. Just freaky as hell. But it's alright. I got you guys to keep me grounded.”

Natasha squeezed Bucky's shoulder. He breathed deep and nodded.

“I'll be okay.”

“Alright, ladies and gentlemen! Gather round.”

Steve cupped Bucky's head in his hand and looked at him one more time, asking him silently if he was going to be okay. But Bucky just nodded his head, jaw set and eyes pulled tight. Steve nodded back, before turning to the commotion Tony was making.

Tony was busying himself hauling cables across the floor, with Rhodey helping him with some of the heavier tangles. Tony piled a particularly heavy-looking bunch into Rhodey's arms and then pointed across the lab, at one of the walls of servers. Rhodey nodded and set off with the bundle as Tony darted the other direction, grabbing at some more plugs and wires.

Wanda, Carol, Jessica, and Pietro stepped closer as Tony worked, looking world's better than they had yesterday. They'd all taken a shower and changed clothes, not to mention brushed out their hair and had a good night's sleep. Wanda still had some shadows under her eyes, and was staring holes into the side of the Vision's box, which Tony had propped up on one of the lab counters. But Carol looked fresh and rested at her side, and was able to lend her the support she needed right now.

Dropping down beneath one of the tables, Tony stuck his tongue out as he worked, ripping open the paneling beneath the desk. He paused only to roll up the sleeves of his garish red coat, then was back to work, fingers and hands disappearing into the underside of the desk.

“Alright, Rhodey, cable number one, please.”

Hauling a massive cable over his shoulder, Rhodey crossed the lab to give it to Tony. After a moment of finagling something clicked, and Tony grinned. He held out his hand. “And cable number two.”

Rhodey passed Tony a much smaller cable coming out of the Vision's box this time. Steve had watched as Tony had installed that very cable last night, once he was done restoring all the data he could.

After a few moments more Tony nodded to himself, then reached a hand up at Rhodey. Once he was on his feet again, Tony slapped his palms agains his dirty jeans and grinned. “All set. So: ladies first.”

With a flourish Tony pressed a button on the workstation he had just been tinkering with. The screens on the wall flared to life, glowing white, then black. A single line of white text appeared on them: a command prompt line. _C:\\._

Tony typed “RUN>VISION” after the prompt. A split-second pause, during which time Steve's heart leapt to his throat. What if it didn't work? What if Tony couldn't bring the Vision back?

But then, like snow falling at night, an outpour of white text on the black screen. Wanda gasped and rushed forward, fingers twitching over the keyboard Tony was at.

“It's not him,” Tony warned. “Not yet. This just tells us where he is.”

“Can you get him, then?” Wanda pleaded. She turned to Tony with big, brown eyes. “Can you find him and bring him here?”

Tony nodded. “That's what all this is for, after all. So, look at this.” He pointed at a particular line of code that read _LOCATION > 411.32.583_ “That's an IP address. I went to it last night. It's a server farm. He's bouncing himself off a million different servers, like a mobile RAID tower. It's his best way of staying alive—even if part of him gets destroyed, the other parts can fill in what went missing with an algorithm. Like how your body fills in a cut with scar tissue, except the scar tissue comes back looking exactly like how your old skin looked.”

“So can you find him?” Carol asked the question again, arms crossed.

Tony smirked. “Already did. I just wanted you ladies to be the ones who called him.”

Wanda's eyes widened, then flickered down to the keyboard beneath her fingertips. “How? What kind of language...”

Tony shrugged. “I'm pretty sure you can just... talk. And he'll see it.”

Frowning down at the keyboard, Wanda bit her lip, brow furrowed in thought. After a moment she typed: _If the Vision is out there, please come here. It's Wanda._

Not a second passed before the command line went blank, and a new line of text appeared: _It is good to hear from you, Wanda. Are Carol and Jessica with you as well?_

Wanda gasped, hands fluttering up to her mouth, before she started laughing. Carol and Jessica whooped and high-fived each other, before Carol ran in to hug Wanda from behind, lifting her off the ground in her enthusiasm. Wanda was crying as she laughed, relief pouring off her.

Beating at Carol's arms tight around her waist, Wanda giggled: “Let me down, let me down! I have to tell him!” Carol set Wanda down, but not before pressing a smacking kiss to her cheek.

With shaking hands Wanda typed: _Jessica and Carol are here with me. They're safe. We're all so happy to find you, Vision_.

“Ask him where he is,” Jessica prompted

“Ask him if he's safe.” Carol poked Wanda in the ribs.

Wanda batted them away. “Okay, okay!” On the keyboard she typed: _Where are you? Are you safe?_

_I am safe. I have saved myself across the world, on millions of different servers. I cannot be damaged by anything less than a catastrophic event. You can communicate with me through any device with an ethernet connection._

“Okay, ladies, don't mean to cut the reunion short, but.” Tony made a wrap it up motion with his fingers. “We've got exhibit two still to get to. Which, actually, I was thinking the Vision might have some fun helping us out with that.”

Wanda nodded and turned back to the keyboard: _We have to go for now—Tony Stark needs to use this terminal. Bucky Barnes is here, and he has a link-up to the metadata. Tony and the rest of them have some nascent plan. Will you stay and watch?_

_Of course. Now that I have found you again, I will not leave you._

Wanda beamed at the computer screen like it had just said the sweetest thing. Steve scrubbed the back of his head. He supposed it _had_ said something pretty swell—in its own way. Wanda backed away from the terminal and into Carol's arms, smiling and whispering and sharing in their little victory.

Tony cracked his knuckles. “Alright. Buck-ster: you're up.”

Bucky grumbled and stepped away from Natasha. “Don't call me that again, Stark.”

“Sure thing, Buck-a-roony.” Tony promised. Steve had to hide a smile from Bucky.

Bucky sat down in front of the terminal, expression just this side of barely reigned-in terror. Steve went over to him and pressed a hand to his shoulder. Whispering, Steve reminded him: “Tony can make this work without you, you know. It's just a matter of time. You don't have to do this.”

But Bucky shook his head firmly, his chin-length hair swishing across his cheeks. “No. I can do this.”

Tony bustled about them, ignoring the quiet exchange as he got the terminal ready. “Okay.” He clapped his hands together. “Should be good to go. Just slip your arm in like you've done before, and let's see how it goes.”

Bucky took a breath and nodded. He shook out his left arm, the one that was glowing blue with the quantum computer inside it, clenching and unclenching his fist. After another deep breath he nodded, and pushed his hand into the hole in the terminal. He went into just above his elbow before he stopped, and nodded.

“Fire it up, Stark,” Bucky told him through gritted teeth.

“Firing it up, Bucky-Bear,” Tony replied sweetly. Then he depressed a key on the terminal with his thumb.

Bucky jumped, body spasming. Steve grabbed him by the shoulders and held on, not sure what more he could do. But after just a second or two, Bucky went still, head lolling down. Steve shot a panicked look over to Tony, who just shook his head and shrugged.

“I'm in.”

Steve jumped at Bucky's voice, coming as it did from his still downturned head. After a moment Bucky shook his head and lifted it, eyes blinking owlishly. The circles around his eyes looked dark, the blue of his eyes bluer. But it was still Bucky behind them, still Bucky looking ahead at the terminal, haunted.

“You okay?” Steve asked, at the same time as Tony ordered him: “Tell us what you see.”

Bucky reached up and grabbed Steve's hand, shaking it slightly. He turned to him, a trace of his old smirk ghosting across his lips. “I've got this, kiddo,” he told him. With a squeeze he let Steve's hand drop and turned to Tony.

“Same shit I always saw. Million lines of code. You're gonna have to give me some direction, like they used to, if you want me to sort through this.”

Tony nodded. “Okay, so... Can you tell how many people know?”

Bucky shot Tony an incredulous look. “What the hell do you think this is, a mind-reading database? Ask me something physical.”

“How many people are there in the world?” Steve asked.

Bucky thought for a second, then the number “three billion, one hundred fifty-five million, three hundred twenty-six thousand, six hundred and... well, change. It keeps bopping up and down every second.”

“Deaths and births,” Tony supplied.

Steve rubbed at his chin. “Don't tell me the numbers, but can you split it up by demographics? Women, men; under twenty, over twenty. Like that?”

“Probably. Lemme try...” Bucky's eyes drifted up to the ceiling as he worked. His arm glowed faintly brighter, to Steve's eyes. “Sex is good, I can do that. Age... Oh, yeah. It was bracketing it per year, but then I can run a grouping... _thing_ on it, I dunno what it's called, but sure, I can do all that.”

Steve glanced over at Tony. “It's the large-scale version-”

Tony cut him off. “Yeah. I got it.”

Steve fell silent as he and Tony exchanged a look. It was just like Tony thought it might be, last night. A large-scale version of the USB the Fates had given him: demographics information down to the every last person. Apparently Tony didn't feel like the time was right to share that thought, though. So Steve shut his mouth and stayed quiet. They could discuss that more later.

Tony tapped at his chin while Bucky waited, arm jammed into the terminal. While he was busy thinking, Steve asked the one thing he was really interested in:

“Can you change anything? Rewrite the code?”

“Don't do it!” Tony warned.

Steve frowned over at Tony. “I know he shouldn't change anything. I just want to know if he _can_.”

Tony slunk forward, wringing his hands as he watched Bucky's expression. “Alright. Do you think you can change the code? But don't try. Don't even think about trying. We don't need to accidentally turn the sky purple and then alert whoever's on the other side that we've become self-aware. That'd be a hell of a stupid way to go. And I should know: I _invented_ going out in a blaze of stupidity.”

Bucky's right hand drummed on the tabletop, his head tilted to the side. “I'm not sure. I know what the code is, I can see it. I think I could... I think I can interact with it. Which means it might be editable.”

“There should be a file that says if you can edit it,” Tony told Bucky. “A file that says if it's read only or not.”

“It's not read only,” Bucky confirmed. “I just can't tell if I've got... uh... I don't know what to call it...”

“Permissions,” Tony supplied. He was already looking away from Bucky, brain going a mile a minute. “That's okay. We can steal permissions. If the whole thing was locked down, then we'd be in trouble.”

“You want to rewrite the code?” Bucky asked. He squirmed a little in his chair, shoulder flexing above where the rest of it was caught in the terminal.

“Yes,” Steve said.

“No,” Tony said right on top of him.

Steve scowled over at Tony. “If we can rewrite the code without them noticing, we can stack the deck so that life is better for everyone-”

“You say that word 'life' and I think you're using it a hell of a lot differently than how _I_ use it,” Tony pointed out.

“You're telling me you _wouldn't_ rewrite life to be better for people if you had the chance?!”

Tony shook his head viciously. “No, because it's _not. life._ I wouldn't waste my time on it!”

“Then what do you care if Bucky can rewrite the code or not?” Steve asked.

“Because: if it's not a read only, then that means the people on the other side of the terminal want the ability to edit it. If they want the ability to edit it, then they actively engage it. Which tells me two things: number one, we have to be careful. If they're out there, watching us, there's not telling when they'll pick up on our little revelation. Number two, we might have a chance at writing ourselves a way out.”

Steve shook his head, breaking his staring contest with Tony. A way out. Tony spoke of that like... like he was planning a trip to the moon. An evacuation off-planet. Which sounded ridiculous and impossible in its own right, a fantasy for science fiction. And then what Tony was _actually_ proposing, an evacuation of the _universe_ , was exponentially more impossible, more ridiculous than that.

The screen behind Tony flashed. Steve blinked, then frowned. It was the screen the Vision used to talk to them; it had flashed white for a second, and now was sitting patiently with a single line of text displayed on it.

_Excuse me, but I think you might be interested to know that there is someone at the terminal._

“Tony.” Steve grabbed his shoulder and turned him around, facing the screen.

“What?”

Simultaneously Steve and Tony turned to look at Bucky, who was looking more nervous than before. He shrugged his free shoulder. “Um? Yeah?”

_My apologies. My meaning is: there is someone at the terminal on the other side._

Steve cocked his head. “You can hear us? And see us?”

_While you were working with Mr. Barnes, I took the liberty of accessing the cameras and microphones in this lab. The surveillance network is down, but I can access any technology that I can reach over the ethernet._

“Wait a second.” Tony pushed Steve aside, standing directly in front of the monitor. “What do you mean there's someone at the terminal?”

_Code is being saved from this universe to a terminal in the metauniverse. I believe this is not an automated process, but someone is at work._

“Oh, hey. I can see that,” Bucky chimed in.

“What?” Tony rounded on Bucky.

“Yeah, it's...” Bucky cocked his head, eyes distant for a moment. “Yeah. There's definitely someone working. He's saving shit from here. Or downloading information. Oh, hey, yeah. That's what he's doing. I can see it. He's downloading some demographics stuff, like Steve was asking about earlier.”

“Can you-” Tony started. But he was interrupted by Bucky.

“Oh. Shit.”

Bucky had gone white. Steve felt the blood drain out of his own face at the sight. Tony looked like he was going to vomit. “What? 'shit' what, Barnes?”

“I, uh... He's talking to me. Guys. He knows... He knows I was watching, shit shit shit, he knows we're in the simulation and that we _know_ , _shit_ guys _what_ get me out of here get me out of here...” Bucky started clawing at the terminal, at his arm. He was so vicious in his attacks that Steve thought he was liable to tear the arm clean off, like a wolf caught in a trap. His struggling started to leave long gashes in his arms, blood running down into the terminal itself. Steve scrambled to get him out.

“Tony, Tony! Get him out, hit the release-” Steve grabbed a hold of Bucky's other arm to stop him from hurting himself as he shouted over at Tony. But Tony was shaking his head, blocking the terminal with his body.

“No! You have to talk to him, Bucky. You have to tell him not to shut us down!”

“I can't talk to him!” Bucky screamed.

Tony strode forward and grabbed Bucky by the hair. Staring him down, Tony growled. “You talk to him or you cease to exist. We _all_ cease to exist. He pulls the plug, and we're _gone_. Like we never _were_. So you calm the fuck down and _talk_ , Barnes!”

Bucky's eyes slid off to the side, panicked and rolling. They landed on Natasha, who was watching all this with the stony face of someone who had accepted their fate. Abruptly Bucky stilled in Steve's arms, going limp. Steve kept a hold of him, just in case.

“'Tasha...”

Natasha was over at Bucky's side in a moment. She gripped his neck hard, fingernails digging into his skin. “You do what Stark says,” she told Bucky, staring him straight in the eye.

“I can't-”

Natasha shook him, like a mother tiger shaking her kitten. “You do it. You talk to this guy. Otherwise we're unmade. Not just dead. Not gone. Unmade.”

Bucky breathed in, breathed out. Slowly Steve released his arm, staying close behind him in case he went off again. Bucky twitched violently once, but squeezed his eyes shut and rode it out, shaking his head. “He's talking again. Asking me. Says he knows I'm there.”

“Talk to him!” Tony shouted.

“Okay! Okay! Just... Fuck. What the fuck am I supposed to say?”

“Say hi,” Steve prompted. A sudden rush of calm had overcome Steve. This was talking. This was a person on the other end of the line. No matter what kind of person—it might be a sixteen foot tall head with tentacles and bright blue—it was still a person.

“Tell whoever it is 'hi'. Say 'It's nice to meet you'.”

“Yeah, yeah, play dumb!” Tony instructed. Steve rolled his eyes.

“Don't play dumb. Just don't show all your cards yet,” Steve corrected Tony.

“Okay, shut up, shut up,” Bucky grumbled, eyes squeezed shut. After a long, tense moment, Bucky announced: “I said hi. I asked how it's going. He says 'hi' back. And asked me my name.”

“He should be able to see it,” Tony mumbled to himself. “It's probably a sentience test. Play dumb.”

“It's too late for that,” Steve insisted. “Tell him your name.”

Bucky groaned and rested his forehead against his captured arm. “Holy fuck, it's like Russian roulette with a fifty-fifty shot of annihilation with each answer.”

A pause, then Bucky announced: “I told him my name. He says his is Bruce. Bruce Banner. He asked who I think I'm talking to.”

“Tell him the truth,” Steve insisted. They were still alive. They hadn't ceased to exist yet. The truth must be serving them okay, so far.

Bucky nodded, going quiet again. Then his eyes went wide. He stared at the machine, expression a touch frantic around his eyes.

“He says he has to record this development.”

“Tell him not to tell anyone!” Tony shouted at Bucky. “Tell him... shit, shit, shit.”

Bucky swore and kicked at the server. “He says this is big. His boss is going to love this.”

“As him to give us a week!” Tony begged. “Just... they'll shut us down, he has to know they're going to shut us down.”

Bucky was shaking his head as he relayed the information back and forth. “He thinks they won't. He says we're 'interesting.'”

Suddenly Tony's expression changed. His eyes glittered, and he breathed: “He's a _scientist_.”

Rushing over to Bucky, Tony squatted down next to him so he could look him in the eye. Tony grabbed Bucky's trapped arm and spoke deliberately. “Tell him that if he wants to study us, he can't tell anyone.” Tony waited a beat until Bucky nodded. “Tell him that it's no good studying a simulation that knows it's a simulation, since it will give them no useful information about _their_ world, which _isn't_ a simulation.” Again, a pause until Bucky nodded. Tony licked his lips and shifted anxiously in his crouch. “Tell him that if he wants to study us, he's gotta keep us on the down-low. Off the books. Tell him we'll talk to him as _long_ as he wants, about _anything_. Remind him how there are no records of anything like us happening before. Remind him that he could _publish_ this. But only if he tells no one. No one can know we're self-aware besides him.”

A longer pause. Steve held his breath, as did everyone else in the room. Bucky's eyes were turned up to the ceiling as he communicated with this doctor on the other side, in the “real” world. Finally, after a heart-pounding wait, Bucky nodded.

“He says our secret's safe with him. He says he wants to study us, though. Get our feelings on being in a simulation. See what our plans are, now.”

Tony gasped with relief, head dropping down to his chest as he ran his hands over the back of his head. Steve scrubbed his face, surprised to find tears there that he hadn't realized he'd been shedding. They were alive. For a little while longer, to satisfying some scientist's curiosity, they were still alive.

“Hey, Bruce is saying he has to run out for a bit,” Bucky told the room. “But he'll be back soon? He says he's leaving us on... 'real time'.”

Tony nodded. “They must run us accelerated most of the time. Then they can watch a billion years pass in a minute, see the rise and fall of an empire in thirty seconds. They have to have the ability to control it, too: slow it down, speed it up. They can watch paradigm shifts happen in real time, then fast forward ahead to the next one.”

Steve bent down and gave Bucky a half-hug from behind, as best he could with Bucky seated and strapped into the terminal.

“Thank you,” he mumbled into Bucky's neck.

“Yeah, yeah,” Bucky grumbled.

“I know that was horrible. Thank you,” Steve told Bucky sincerely. Bucky responded by shrugging Steve off as best he could with one arm.

“Steve.” Tony nodded over at the other side of the room, then started down that way. Steve followed quickly. He didn't want to be far from Bucky when this Bruce Banner showed back up.

Tony stopped in front of one of the lab bedrooms they had found Bucky in, swiping the door open with one hand. Steve followed him inside, the door shutting behind him.

“What?” Steve asked as soon as they were alone.

Tony shook his head, arms wrapped around his torso. “I don't know. I... We're still here. We're still alive.” Tony paused for a long moment, staring off to the side. After a while he whispered: “I never thought we'd talk to one of the ones who made us.”

In two strides Steve had Tony in his arms, hugging him tight to his chest. He pulled back just enough to kiss Tony: firmly, sweetly. Tony leaned against him, head tilted up into the kiss, body slowly relaxing against Steve's. When Steve broke the kiss he stayed wrapped around Tony, holding him close. “You're the smartest guy I've ever known,” he told Tony honestly.

“I'm-”

“Tony: shut up.” Steve smiled and ran a hand through Tony's hair. “You're the smartest guy I've ever known. If there's a single person in this universe who can figure this out, who can walk this line without getting us all deleted from existence forever, it's you.”

Tony swallowed thickly. “I don't think anyone can do that, is the problem.”

“Yeah, well: I think you can,” Steve countered with a shrug.

Tony shook his head and huffed. “Your faith in me is uncalled for, you know that?”

“Maybe. But you trust me, don't you?”

Tony's response was immediate: “Of course. Of course I trust you.”

“Then trust me trusting you. I trust you. And if you can't believe in yourself, then believe in me, who believes in you.”

Tony's lips twitched. “You're a cornball.”

Steve sighed and shoved Tony away good-naturedly. Tony laughed and grabbed at his wrist, dragging him in for an apology kiss.

“You like it,” Steve pointed out when they broke the kiss.

Tony grinned, wide and honest. “Yeah. Guess I do. In spite of my better judgement.”

“Feeling's mutual,” Steve teased. Then he got serious again. “So what's the plan?”

Tony grimaced. “I don't know. We can't let him tell his superiors about us. This Bruce is obviously just some guy working in a lab somewhere, some idealistic guy. Science for science's sake, you know? Otherwise he would have shut us down. His superiors _will_ shut us down. So that's priority number one: keep him from telling anyone about us. Priority number two, greatly related to priority number one: keep him interested in us. As long as he wants to keep talking, we stay alive. So we better hope we've got something interesting to say.”

“Well you said he was a scientist. And you're a scientist. You should do the talking. Whatever he wants to talk about, you probably are the best one for the job.”

Tony nodded to himself as Steve spoke. “Maybe. You might be right. We can give it a go for today, at least.”

Steve hesitated. Knowing they didn't have much more time, he forged ahead against his trepidations: “Tony, about the USB...”

Tony shook his head. “Not now. Not yet. We'll work on it tonight—if I can buy us that much time. But not yet.”

Steve nodded and shut his mouth. He could be patient. If Tony thought they had at least one more night to discuss things, to plan, then Steve would trust that they had one more night.

Steve dragged Tony in for one more kiss before they reentered the lab together, pressing his tongue into Tony's mouth and tasting how _real_ he felt, how warm and slick and _there_ he was. Steve brushed a hand through Tony's hair, cupped his jaw, felt his hair and skin and pulse beneath his fingers. Tony trembled and clutched Steve's arm with one hand, holding on tight. When they separated Steve nuzzled his nose against Tony's jaw, then let him go.

“Anything?” Tony asked Bucky as soon as they were back in the lab.

Bucky shook his head. “Not back yet.”

Tony clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “And we still exist, so. Hey. There's that.”

The room just stared at Tony grimly. He shrugged and shoved his hands in his coat pocket. “Just saying what everyone's thinking,” he pointed out.

A few minutes later, Bucky waved over at Stark: “He's back.”

“Say hi, ask how he is,” Steve prompted as he and Tony rushed over to the terminal. No need to forget manners, especially at a time like this. Good manners might just save their lives.

“Ask him what he wants to know. We're at his disposal.”

Bucky nodded to both of them, eyes up as he communicated with Bruce.

“Hey says 'hi' back. And says first question he's got for us: when do you think you achieved sentience.”

Tony frowned. “Forever? Since we crawled out of the primordial ooze?”

They waited as Bucky transmitted that. He came back with: “When do you think you became conscious?”

Tony laughed. “Uh, since homo sapiens roamed the earth. Actually, he could probably settle the debate right now: ask him how long ago homo sapiens showed up. I could make money off this.”

Bucky frowned for a second, then said: “I think he... I think he laughed. Sorry, it's murky in here. He's not hooked up like I am.”

The screen behind Tony flashed white again: the Vision was trying to get their attention. Steve squinted at the monitor. “Vision says he was laughing. I guess the Vision's got a better sense for that kind of thing than you'd have, Bucky. Uh, thanks. Vision.”

 _You are most welcome_ , flashed across the monitor. Steve smiled lopsidedly. He was talking to a computer program.

Well. Steve's smile dimmed. Technically they were _all_ computer programs. It really shouldn't be that impressive, if he thought about it.

Tony was still in deep with Bruce, arguing through Bucky with him. “What? What's he laughing at? Is it good or bad?”

“He says... he can't tell you that. If he's going to talk with us, he's got to have some rules.”

“Fair enough,” Tony shrugged.

“He thinks you're clever,” Bucky added, then promptly rolled his eyes.

“Tell him I'm taken.”

Steve was actually surprised by Tony's response. Even though it didn't really mean anything: Tony was just joking around with this guy. There was no real way for Tony and Bruce to be together, which Tony was of course aware of. He just said that to garner some good will with the scientist.

At least, that's what Steve told himself. Until Tony looked over at him and smiled: a soft thing, like the sun filtering through the smog late morning. Steve found himself smiling back involuntarily. Oh. Okay then.

Oblivious to or undeterred by Steve and Tony's honeymoon bliss, Bucky relayed Bruce's response: “He says he's flattered you even bothered to tell him. Then he asked when you think you first became aware that you were in a simulation.”

Tony tapped at his chin. “I'm not sure. Half the people in this room found out a little over a week ago and a half ago. The other half have known for something like ten years?” Tony's voice went up at the end of the sentence as he turned to Wanda, Carol, and Jessica. Wanda nodded her confirmation of Tony's assessment.

“But someone has known for decades. It was a big secret: an elite few kept the information hidden for decades. Maybe centuries.”

“Bruce says to hang on a minute. He wants to check some records.”

Tony nodded. “Tell him I know he can't tell us specifics, but from what we've pieced together over the last week, it looks like at the height of technological advancement, an isolated few scientist figured it out. They then took measures to make sure no one else would find out. They retarded the education for the masses, and their technological development.”

A pause while Bucky relayed all this to Bruce. After a moment he nodded and shrugged. “He's still looking some stuff up.”

Tony sighed, flubbinghis lips like a horse. He rocked back on his heels and glanced over at Steve. “Let's hope he doesn't decide to just rewind the simulation and talk to those guys instead. The ones who first figured it out.”

Steve's eyes went wide. “Can he do that?”

Tony shrugged. “He can accelerate the speed time passes here. We'd never know it, but a thousand years could pass here in a minute over there. It wouldn't be absurd to think he could go in reverse.”

“But they don't have the interface,” Wanda pointed out. “Or, we don't know if they did. We're a sure line of communication. The people in the past are not.”

Tony wiped his palms off on his jeans. “Let's just hope he comes to the same conclusion. Or that he likes us better.”

“He's back,” Bucky announced. Everyone in the room focused back on him. Bucky's head was tilted back as he listened. “He says he located that paradigm shift in the history. He marked it down—in his own records, not the public ones. He says now he wants to run a host of simulations from that point, see how different people react to becoming aware of the simulation. Says it's interesting how we reacted one way the first time, and differently a second time. Says...” Bucky rubbed his head and groaned. “It's like listening to Stark natter on. Fucking awful. Okay. He's basically really excited, talking about all the different simulations he could run, all the different reactions people could have-”

“Tell him that's monstrous!” Steve protested. “Tell him these are people's _lives_ he's messing with. He's talking about creating new life just to... to destroy it, to reveal they're unreal, just for his own curiosity?! It's not even for a _reason_ : Tony said simulations that know they're a simulation can give no useful data to a world that isn't a simulation. He's creating people, just to tear them down, and all for his own idle curiosity!”

Bucky winced, opened his mouth. Steve shook his head. “No, you tell him that! Don't hold back. This Dr. Banner needs to be reminded that we're alive! That we're real people, with real thoughts and feelings. How would he feel if _his_ world turned out to be a simulation? You ask him that!”

Tony crossed his arms and rolled his head over to Steve. “You know, maybe you shouldn't get into arguments with the guy who could turn off our existence with a push of a button.”

Steve clenched his fists. “He needs to know. He needs to think. We're real people in here. We're _real_. He needs to remember that.”

“He says you're not real.”

Tony snorted. “Debatable. But okay: let's say 'real' might not be the best word. We're still conscious.”

A pause, then Bucky shook his head. “He says you're not.”

Tony actually _grinned_ at this. He stepped forward to Bucky and requested: “Ask him what his standard for consciousness is.” He tapped Bucky's good arm excitedly.

Steve frowned, not sure where this was going or what good it would do. But he nodded at Bucky, who turned his attention back to the machine.

A moment later Bucky announced: “He says we can't be conscious because we're determined.”

Tony snorted. “Tell him bullshit. Quantum physics applies in our world, which means the Heisenberg uncertainty principle does, too. We're not determined, we're probabilistic.”

Bucky went silent for a moment as he transmitted the message in whatever way he did. After a moment he relayed: “Banner says he can control what happens to us. Rewrite some code and make gravity double. Rewrite some other code and wipe you out of existence, or make you like kale, or implant memories.”

“Tell him: I can implant memories too. Memories are the easiest thing to manipulate in a person. Tell him I can wipe him out of existence with a well-placed bullet. Tell him I can make gravity double with a supercollider and dense enough material. 'Control' is not a stringent enough criteria to disregard consciousness. Slave owners controlled their slaves—it doesn't mean slaves weren't conscious, weren't real people with real emotions and dreams and desires.”

Bucky left his head fall forward against the terminal as he relayed all of this, sighing loudly. “You know, when you guys liberated the capital I didn't exactly think I'd be spending the rest of my days relaying a fucking philosophical discussion for your new boyfriend and some asshole in a lab coat,” he complained to Steve.

Steve twisted his mouth sympathetically. “It's our only chance of staying alive long enough to figure something else out,” he reminded Bucky.

“Better come up with a better chance, then,” Bucky shot back. Then he paused for a moment, eyes unfocused as he listened to whatever Banner was saying on the other side. “Okay, he says that for argument's sake, let's say you're conscious. It doesn't mean you're real.”

“Seriously, back to that again? What the _fuck_ is your definition of 'real'?!” Tony shouted.

After a brief pause, Bucky replied: “He says 'uncreated'. You were created by him and his labs.”

“What, you're telling me universe prime has always been and will always be? That it's its own unmoved mover? Fuck that. I call bullshit six ways from Sunday,” Tony snapped.

Bucky sighed and waited several seconds, eyes trained on nothing. Then he replied: “Banner says there was a beginning to his universe, but it wasn't by some guys in a lab. They're not a simulation. They run the simulation. All of them.”

“But we could run a simulation!” Tony countered, gesticulating vehemently. “I was about two weeks away from doing exactly that, before the Council booted my ass to the streets and retarded my research. I can create just as many simulations as they did. And besides: how the fuck does he know his universe is 'real' and not just the simulation of some more alpha universe, huh?”

A longer pause. Bucky's face went pale before he glanced up at Tony. Steve leaned forward worriedly. “He... Banner says: 'Our universe isn't pixelated.'”

Tony's mouth clicked audibly shut, his eyes shining with worry. Steve swallowed, eyes darting between the two men. “Tony?” he asked once the silence stretched to intolerable lengths. “Tony. What does that mean?” He'd heard it before. Obadiah had said it. Tony had been moaning it. “Pixelation.”

Tony reached forward and grabbed Bucky by the front of his shirt, bringing their faces close together. “Our universe is a simulation,” he said, very slowly. “But that doesn't mean we're not real. Index your possible worlds better, asshole,” he growled. Then he shoved Bucky away from him and stormed off, footsteps echoing through the grand marble halls.

Steve dropped down on his haunches next to Bucky, eyebrows furrowed in worry. “Sorry. Sorry. He's talking to-”

Bucky nodded, eyes distant as he relayed the information. “I know, hang on...” Bucky shook his head, listening again until he nodded. “Sorry. Can't have the two conversations at once. I'm not Stark. And yeah, don't worry about him. I know he's talking to Bruce, not me. Anyway, you want to know Bruce's reply?”

Steve sighed, then nodded. “Sure. I'll tell Tony once he cooled down a bit.”

“He says that we pass the Turing test—whatever the fuck _that_ is—but he needs more evidence before he reaches any further conclusions.” Bucky paused for a second. “I told him Stark stormed out of here. He said he can come back tomorrow, if that's alright.”

“Tell him yes, please. And thank him. And apologize for Tony.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Why do I feel like that's supposed to be your job? Apologizing for Tony.”

“Bucky-”

“Yeah, yeah.” Bucky waved Steve off with his one free hand. “I got it. Go run off to comfort your man, or whatever.”

Steve snorted, but saluted Bucky with two fingers before heading out of the lab at a jog.

He caught up to Tony somewhere halfway to the palace. They couldn't talk out here, so Steve just fell into step next to Tony, letting him fume silently as they made their way inside. Steve nodded at the people he passed, the people who were looking at him like he was some kind of celebrity. Another pang of guilt in his gut reminded him that they needed to figure out a solution sooner rather than later. All these people, they all believed in Steve. All thought he was their savior, their hero. Thought he had saved them all.

 _Save us, Steve Rogers_!

But he hadn't yet. Their work wasn't done. They had torn the city walls down, but the people would never be saved, or safe, until he and Tony figured out how to guarantee their simulation would never be shut down. Or... something else.

They passed under the awning of the palace, the bright sunshine cutting off sharply. Once they were inside the palace and the doors clicked shut behind them, Steve turned to Tony.

“Tony? Tony. What did he mean? 'Our universe isn't pixelated'?”

Tony ran a hand through his hair. He kept moving forward, though his paces had lost their storming quality. “It's this... _thing_ , in quantum physics. The further down you go, the closer you get to looking at the building blocks of the universe, the more pixelated things look. I always thought it was just how it was, that's just how the universe worked. But I guess the 'real' universe doesn't work that way. Physics looks different at the quantum level for them or something. It's...” They came to a stop in front of Tony's bedroom. Tony turned to Steve. “It's proof we _are_ in a simulation. Proof I've seen with my own eyes. I just didn't know what it meant at the time.”

“But that doesn't mean we're not real.” Steve meant for it to sound sure, a statement of fact. Instead his voice wavered, and it came out sounding like a plea. Like he was asking Tony to tell him it was true, that he was right.

Thankfully, Tony seemed to know exactly what Steve needed. Maybe he needed it too. Because he reached up and cupped Steve's jaw in his hands, thumbs rubbing over his cheeks.

“We're _real_ ,” Tony confirmed. “You're _real_. I'm _real_. And I'm not going to let some trumped-up scientist in another universe tell me otherwise. We're going to fight for this, Steve. You and me. We're going to fight for our right to exist. And we're not going to stop until we get it, or they wipe us out of the universe.”

Steve kissed Tony fiercely, blood pounding in his ears, rushing through his veins. Tony felt so _real_ beneath his hands. His skin against Steve's, his lips against Steve's, his teeth, tongue, his eyelashes fluttering against Steve's cheeks.

Steve's back hit Tony's door with a _thump,_ breaking the kiss for them. Tony breathed against Steve's mouth, his goatee tickling his chin. “Take this inside?”

Reaching behind Steve, Tony grabbed the knob and pushed the door open, sending them stumbling into his bedroom in a tangle of tongue and breath and limbs. Steve immediately tripped over a pile of cables and miscellaneous hardware, almost sending him sprawling until he grabbed onto Tony for support. Turning away from Tony and toward the bedroom, Steve took in the mess. Particularly, the piles of electronics that covered Tony's bed.

“We are not having sex on this,” Steve laughed.

Tony growled and jumped onto his bed, tossing everything to the floor with a few wide sweeps of his arms. “There! Clean!”

“Something is going to explode,” Steve warned.

Tony groaned in frustration. “Hey, which one of us is the engineering genius, you or me? I say it's not going to explode, it's not going to explode. Except my dick. In your ass. So get over here.”

“You're crude,” Steve pointed out, even though he was absolutely getting his ass over to the bed, shedding clothes as he went.

Tony's expression brightened like a pup catching sight of a ball. He followed Steve's lead, stripping out of his clothes quick as he could. “Come here, come here.” Tony reached out to Steve with grabbing hands, clenching and unclenching them impatiently.

Grinning in spite of his best efforts not to, Steve hopped up onto the bed with Tony, kissing him firmly as he climbed on top. He pushed Tony back into the mattress with the force of his kiss, to which Tony responded to by reaching up and dragging him in closer, hands on the back of his neck. Steve lowered his hips against Tony's, both men gasping into each other's mouths as they felt the hot friction building between them.

Tony peppered one, two, three last kisses to Steve's lips before pushing up against his shoulders. “Let me up,” Tony ordered. “Get on your back, come on.”

“So romantic,” Steve teased. But he couldn't deny the way his stomach flipped at the command. He hurried to obey, lying himself down on the mattress.

Tony swooped in to capture his lips in another kiss, mouth dragging to the side to scrape at his jaw, nuzzle at his neck. He mumbled “wait here,” in the skin under Steve's ear, before crawling up the bed.

Steve squirmed, feeling exposed. He glanced down at his erection, then flushed and looked back up at the ceiling. He idly wondered if he should play with himself. Would that be hot? Sexy? Tony would probably like that. But Steve couldn't help feeling like he'd make a fool of himself, trying to look sexy. He'd probably just end up looking like some awkward, splotchy, grunting guy, sweaty and perverse. Steve flushed and kept his hands by his sides as he waited for Tony to come back.

When Tony slid back down the bed to Steve, it was with a bottle of lubricant in his hand.

“Forgot I found this, second or third night I was here. Was looking for something else, and my head wasn't exactly on sexing you up—shocking, I know—but I figured I'd grab it just in case. And wouldn't you know it...” Tony grinned and looked Steve up and down like a particularly delicious buffet. Steve flushed some more. “Looks like my planning paid off.”

“I can't believe you found some,” Steve laughed as Tony slicked up his fingers. Some of the tension eased from his body as Tony moved between his legs, rubbing his thighs with one hand. Tony wanted him. Tony thought he was sexy. And Tony himself was a sight to behold: all dark hair and olive skin, lean muscle compared to Steve's bulk.

“Always prepared,” Tony swore, holding up two fingers like a boy scout. A drop of lube fell from them and splattered on the sheets. Steve laughed and smacked at Tony, who wrestled him down to the mattress with one hand. Steve might have let him—no point in putting up a fight for something you wanted, after all.

Steve sighed as Tony's fingers probed his entrance. He let his legs fall open, body relaxing as Tony carefully prepared him. Tony's left hand was on Steve's thigh, rubbing it soothingly as he pressed his fingers in, curled them, pulled them out. Steve groaned a little and arched his back, enjoying the slow process.

“Your dick is annoyingly gorgeous, you know that?” Tony asked. He bent down to lick a stripe up Steve's erection, fingers still buried deep inside. Steve arched to the touch, stomach hitching at the additional stimulation.

“Annoyingly?” Steve asked. He couldn't think of a wittier comeback at the moment. Was a little bit preoccupied.

“Mmhmm,” Tony hummed around the head of Steve's dick. Steve hissed and reached a hand down, tangling it in Tony's hair. His fingers were pumping more steadily in and out now, fucking Steve with them. Steve twitched and tried to spread his legs wider, feet slipping a little on the sheets. Tony slurped as he released Steve's erection. “Distractingly,” he explained. “Annoyingly distracting.”

“That doesn't even... make sense...” Steve mumbled, eyes squeezed shut. He tugged lightly at Tony's hair. “Could you... more...?”

Turning his head, Tony bit down on Steve's inner thigh, soothing it with his tongue a second later. “Anything you want. You just gotta say the word.”

Steve blushed hard, even as his hips pressed down onto Tony's fingers, fucking himself on them. “More... fingers? Please?”

Tony bit a mark into Steve's other thigh. He could feel Tony's smile against his skin there, even as he lapped the mark away. “Well. Since you asked so nicely.”

Steve groaned as Tony slipped a third finger in, opening him up with every push. Steve bit his lip, head lolling to the side as he concentrated on the feel of Tony inside of him, on Tony between his legs, on Tony's fingers, massaging his slick inner walls.

“Can you... now...?”

“Hmm?” Tony peppered little kisses along Steve's thighs, fingers thrusting obliviously in and out. “What was that?”

Exasperated, Steve smacked a hand to Tony's shoulder. “Fuck me, Tony.”

Tony laughed, but also removed his fingers and hopped up on his knees. “Oh, Steve: and you were calling _me_ crude!”

Steve didn't have a response to that, which was for the best because even if he did, it would have been driven from him the second Tony entered him. All thought was driven from Steve's head in that moment, anything other than Tony: Tony's skin, Tony's sweat, Tony's arousal inside of him, pushing through his clenching opening, penetrating slick and hot and thick.

Blindly Steve reached up, grabbing a handful of Tony's forearm. Tony gripped him back, leaning forward so he could hold him better. “I got you,” Tony promised. Steve knew he meant it.

When Tony moved inside of him, Steve held Tony tighter, tugging him down until they could kiss. Tony hiked Steve's legs up, folding them between their chests so he could stay inside of Steve as they kissed. Steve moaned into Tony's mouth, saliva dripping down in his chin in a way that had to be unattractive, but he suddenly didn't care. For his part, Tony was right there with Steve, moaning back and grunting, thrusting into Steve like he couldn't help himself, couldn't bury himself deep enough.

“Feel good?”

Steve groaned. “Feel so good, Tony. Feels perfect. I love you inside of me.”

Tony's thrusts stuttered, then started up again. He pressed his face into Steve's neck, sweat mingling on their skin. “Me too,” he whispered.

Steve reached around Tony, pulling him even closer, blunted fingernails scratching down his back. Tony hissed, pounding into Steve harder. He lifted his head up so he could look down at Steve, grinning with satisfaction. “Like that?” Grunting, Tony reached down and hauled at Steve's ass, pulling it up higher, sliding Steve down the bed. Steve laughed for a second, until the breath was knocked out of him by a surge of pleasure. He curled up against Tony, then fell back, hands slipping off Tony's shoulders.

“Uhn, there, Tony...”

“Yeah, I know.”

Steve wanted to smack Tony for his arrogance, but that might make Tony stop, and Steve never wanted Tony to stop.

“Harder, please,” he found himself saying, shameless.

Obediently Tony pounded into Steve harder, brow drawn low in concentration. The sound of their pants and grunts and skin slapping against skin filled the room.

Tony's hand slipped through sweat and precome for Steve's erection, fingertips dancing around the lush pubic hair at the base for a moment. “I'm gonna come soon,” he warned. “Do you...”

Steve shook his head. “Don't touch it. Don't. I can...” Steve whined and arched his back, fucking himself down onto Tony's dick as best he could from his position. “I can come like this. I want to come like this.”

Tony shook his head, beads of sweat falling from him onto Steve's chest. “Better be soon, because I can't-”

Steve clenched around Tony, breathing hard, heart going a mile a minute. “Almost...” he promised Tony. His pleasure was spiraling, radiating outwards from where Tony was inside of him, pooling in the base of his penis. Frantically Steve grabbed at Tony's neck.

“Kiss me-” he pleaded. Tony practically fell on top of him, kissing him into the mattress, hips moving and moving, thrusting himself inside Steve in powerful, jarring strokes. Tony's stomach rubbed against Steve's erection, sending shocks of pleasure through his system. “ _Harder_ ,” Steve begged into Tony's mouth. And then, finally, a few more powerful thrusts and Steve was falling, arching, spilling his release all over himself and Tony. Steve cried out, muscles tensing, holding Tony to him so tight that Tony had to stop, couldn't move inside him anymore. Tony made up for it by reaching between them and grabbing Steve tight, jerking him through the last of his orgasm. Steve twitched and cried out again, oversensitive but wanting it, needing Tony to keep touching him.

As Steve's body slowly unclenched, Tony started moving inside of him again. “I'm close, I'm so close,” he promised in Steve's ear.

Steve could do little more than whimper, soft little “uhn, uhn,”s jarred from his mouth with every thrust. His body tingled, electrified, too alive but there was no such thing, so Steve held onto the moment with every fiber of his being. Tony kissed him hard as he came, burying himself deep inside Steve, rolling his hips around and around as he used Steve's body to wring every last drop of come from his dick.

They collapsed to the bed together. Well, Tony collapsed, Steve just kind of... let himself melt into the mattress, content to never be seen of or heard from again. After a minute, maybe more, Tony reached out a hand and slapped lazily at Steve's stomach. “'s good,” he mumbled.

Steve laughed. He couldn't help himself. It was probably the endorphins still pumping through his system. With the last of his energy he rolled onto his side so he could look over at Tony. He was half-asleep, eyes shut and breathing evening out. “It was very good,” Steve agreed, with a kiss. Then he dragged whatever sheets he could find up around him and let himself fall asleep. He was pretty sure Tony managed to do the same, eventually.

 

 


	16. Runaways

 

“What is jamming into my back?” Steve grumbled.

Behind him, Tony giggled. Steve rolled his eyes and reached behind him, feeling around.

“I know it's not _that_ ,” Steve pointed out. “'Hard enough to cut diamonds' wouldn't be hyperbolic, in that case,” he grumbled. After a moment of fishing around and shifting, Steve's fingers finally closed around whatever it was that was jabbing him. He got ahold of it and tugged, bringing it around to his front. It was... something. A metal casing for something, maybe? Some kind of metal rectangle.

Steve sighed and threw it off the side of Tony's bed, into the jungle of electronic bits and bobs that filled the room. “This is terrible. You can't possibly live like this normally.”

Rolling over, Steve watched as Tony shrugged, focus more on the tablet in his lap. He was naked, same as he'd fallen asleep last night, sitting cross-legged with his back against the headboard, pillows piled high behind him. “I don't. You've seen my bedroom before. But lab and bedroom kind of merged, thanks to necessity, so...” Tony trailed off, tongue poking out the side of his mouth as he worked.

Steve leaned in and pressed a kiss to Tony's knee, before pushing himself up to sit beside him.

“Morning,” Tony mumbled out of the side of his mouth. He leaned over and pursed his lips out to the side, never taking his eyes off his tablet. Steve grinned and tucked himself between Tony and the tablet, settling half in his lap. Then he gave Tony a good-morning kiss, free of distraction. Tony grunted complainingly into his mouth, but after a second the tablet was abandoned onto the bed as Tony brought his arms up to kiss Steve.

“Very good morning?” Tony asked, raising his eyebrows. His expression brightened as his hands ran up and down Steve's back. “Is it about to be a _great_ morning?”

Steve laughed and kissed Tony again, then removed himself from his lap. Settling in next to him, Steve pointed at the tablet. “What are you working on?”

Tony sighed, but picked his tablet back up and swiped his fingers across it. “I need the USB the Fates gave you. You wanted to have a plan—I just might have one.”

Steve tip-toed his way off the bed, bare toes curling away from the sharp edges of discarded electronic detritus. He found his pants on the floor where he'd dropped them last night and bent to rummage through them. A wolf-whistle from the bed had him blushing and hurrying to straighten up, hands fluttering between his rear and groin, at odds with himself over what to cover.

Tony gave him a thumbs-up from the bed, grinning. Steve scowled and bent back to his search, crouching this time instead of bending at the waist. After a moment more of probing, Steve's fingers closed around the hard rectangle of the USB.

He returned back to the bed victorious, presenting the USB to Tony with some flair. As Tony went to take the USB from him, he captured Steve's whole hand in his and brought it to his mouth to kiss it. Steve grinned and settled in next to Tony to watch him work. Maybe refusing Tony the “great” morning he had asked for was a mistake on Steve's part.

Tony's fingers flew over the tablet screen for a few moments, doing things that Steve had zero hope of understanding any time soon. He wasn't a computer scientist, that was for sure.

“Aren't you going to ask me if I'm worried that Banner will see what we're doing, or the Fates will via Vision?” Tony asked after a few minutes passed in silence.

Alarmed, Steve turned to Tony. “Can they do that?”

“In fact, they cannot. Because I cobbled this baby together out of spare parts and didn't make it with ethernet connectivity.”

Steve frowned. “Oh. Well that's good. But then did you want me to ask?”

Sighing, Tony leaned his head against Steve's shoulder. “I wanted you to compliment me on my cleverness. But never mind. Good thing I'm so self-complimentary.”

“You're very clever,” Steve reassured Tony. Leaning in, he pressed a kiss to his nose. Tony preened. Then scowled, like he hadn't meant to be caught preening.

“Yeah, well. Too clever by half, some would say,” Tony muttered. Then he nudged his shoulder into Steve. “Okay. You wanted a plan? I've got... An eighth of a plan.”

“That number is bigger than zero, so it's good enough for me. Let's hear it.”

Setting the tablet aside for a moment, Tony turned to Steve.

“You remember what the Fates told you?”

Steve said the first thing that came to mind; the thing that had been weighing so heavily on him these last few months: “'Save us, Steve Rogers.'”

Tony shot Steve a curious look—something that was a mixture of pride and pity. “No. Not that part. 'Data is King.'”

Steve nodded. “Sure. It was their dig at you. They dealt with trafficking information; you dealt in goods and services.”

“But it's more than that.” Tony held up a finger. “They knew we were living in a simulation, right?”

“So by 'data is king' they really meant 'metadata is king',” Steve posited. He wasn't sure where Tony was going with this. “They were able to know more than you because they had access to the metadata.”

“Although true—and most certainly cheating—that's not what they were talking about either. Not the whole picture, at least.”

“Well then what was it?”

Tony tapped meaningfully at his chest. “They told you to save us. They told us data is king. I've already saved myself. Everything that I am is on here. And if data really is king, then this is all that matters. My data. We're just data streams, after all. You and me: we're just data.”

Steve bit his lip, eyes flickering down to the glowing blue network in Tony's chest. Reaching out, he placed a reassuring hand on Tony's knee, rubbing it lovingly. “So what does that mean?”

Tony sucked in a deep breath. “It means I think we can get out. It means we could save everybody: by saving them. To one of these.” Tony captured Steve's hand in his and pressed it to his chest.

Steve's fingerpads stroked over Tony's skin. “You mean, saving everything everyone is to... quantum computers? Saving their DNA, their personalities, their memories...”

Tony nodded. “Yeah. That's right.”

“But how will that help everyone? How will that change the fact that we're in a simulation?”

Tony's thumb ran over the back of Steve's hand. Steve could feel his prosthetic rubbing against Tony's chest, over his less physically obtrusive prosthetic. “Because if we're all just data, we can send that over to the universe. Think about it: they take data from us all the time. On how long we live, the rise and fall of our empires. They could download the books that we write or movies that we make, if they wanted to. If we're just data, and we have the storage capacity to _save_ all that data—the data of _everyone_ who's alive right now—then they should be able to download that, too. We could live, Steve. We could really _live_ : not just as simulations, but as real people, in the real universe. Our skin and bones could be a physical reality instead of just pixels on screen.”

Tony's voice cracked as he looked at Steve, his grip tightening around Steve's hand. “I could touch you, Steve. I could run my hand over yours, I could kiss you, and we wouldn't be seeing pixels, or streams of data. We'd be touching each other's actual skin, each other's actual sweat and saliva and tears. Don't you... Don't you want...?”

Steve sucked in a breath. Shutting his eyes against the raw _hope_ in Tony's expression. Steve brought Tony's hand up to his lips, kissing it and holding it there. “Of course I want,” Steve whispered against Tony's fingers. His eyes opened and met Tony's. “But how? You can't download a person. Even if you could: download to where? We'd just be data on a computer in their lab, which is the same place we are now. What's the difference?”

Tony stole his hand back from Steve, a determined glint in his eye. He raised his chin defiantly. “I've got a plan. Do you trust me?”

“Of course I trust you.”

Tony nodded. “Then wait and see. This,” he picked up the tablet and thumbed at the USB sticking out of its side. “This is like the box Wanda gave us that originally housed the Vision. He's too big to be in that box now, but the information to find him was there. This USB: this is our original Vision. Vision mark I. We can use it to find and catalogue every thinking person on this planet. Then, we can start to save them.”

Steve nodded, brows furrowed. “I trust you, Tony. I don't understand it, but I trust you. You do what you need to do today, when we're talking to Dr. Banner. And I'll be there with you, one hundred percent.” Steve paused for a second, thinking, then cracked a smile. “Except maybe this time don't storm off because he tells you we're fake, okay? We already know that. No reason to lose your temper.”

Tony pouted. “No promise. Guy's a jerk.”

Steve smiled and leaned over to press a kiss to Tony's forehead. “He's not a jerk.” Steve thumbed at the back of Tony's neck, nuzzling at his hairline. The tension melted from Tony accordingly. “He's just telling the truth. It's probably a shock to him, too: imagine your computer program started talking back to you, one day, and you didn't know it could.”

“The first thing out of my mouth wouldn't be 'you're not real,'” Tony grumbled. “This guy is like... the difference between the kid who tried his whole life to find the entrance to Narnia, versus the kid who, when faced with Santa Claus in his living room Christmas Eve announced 'you're not real'. Bruce is the latter. Kill-joy.”

Considering this for a moment, Steve eventually murmured: “I always wanted to find Narnia. Mostly because I thought I could help.”

“I wanted to figure out the physics behind it,” Tony admitted. “And the time. I _always_ wanted to make a formula for the difference in time elapse.”

“Nerd,” Steve teased.

“Hero,” Tony replied back. It was exactly the opposite of a tease.

Resolutely, Steve grabbed ahold of Tony's tablet and set it on the ground beside the bed. When he came back up, Tony was cocking his head at him, a little smile just starting to play around the corners of his mouth. “What-”

Steve silenced Tony with a kiss, pushing him back onto the mattress with a surety that boded no arguments. When he pulled back, leaving Tony panting, Steve grinned down at him. “I've reconsidered how we should start our morning,” he explained.

Tony didn't question him one bit.

* * *

Steve sipped on a hot coffee as they settled back into the lab for the second day of talks with this scientist Bruce Banner. He pulled up a chair around the console Bucky had to be tethered to, Tony following suit a moment later. The Fates were there, Pietro not. Natasha stood at Bucky's side, Clint and Bobbi parked further back, handing a back of potato chips between them. Sam and Rhodey were out, too: off on a run to Jennifer's ghetto and Luke's. They still had to keep up the business of running society, even if they were working to figure out a way out. No one could know until a solution was found—no one more than already knew.

Bucky's steps were sure as he walked over to the console, but his expression was grim. Setting his coffee cup down, Steve hopped up and went to his side. He pressed a comforting hand to Bucky's arm, the one with the QC glowing steadily from it.

“You going to tell me I don't have to do this?” Bucky grumbled.

“No,” Steve replied honestly. Bucky snorted, and Steve allowed himself a little huffing laugh, too. “Well, sorry. But we really need you. I wanted to see if you were alright, though.”

“Yeah, yeah. I'm alright.” Bucky rolled his eyes, nodding over at Tony. “Just in a bad mood because I know I gotta translate his bullshit all day long. In stereo.”

Steve grinned and clapped Bucky on the shoulder. “Yeah. You're fine.”

“Yeah, I am,” Bucky sighed.

Tony cleared his throat and wagged his finger in a circle in a clear “move along” gesture. “Okay, so. We going to get this show on the road? Every second we're not talking to Bruce is a second he could change his mind.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “For the sake of our continued existence, we should probably keep _you_ from talking to him.” But at the same time he was saying this, Bucky was sitting down in front of the terminal and rolling up his sleeve. He took one, two, three deep breaths, and then he pushed his arm in, expression grim. Steve could tell when he made the connection, because his whole body jerked, his eyes snapped shut. It took a few seconds, but eventually the tension eased and Bucky relaxed into position.

With a couple loud scrapes across the linoleum lab floor, Tony hopped his chair closer to Steve's. “Hey, look familiar?” he whispered to Steve, indicating Bucky's arm in the terminal.

Steve blushed and smacked Tony, sending Tony into a fit of giggles as he raised his hands to ward off the attack. “I don't know, you tell me,” Steve shot back, still smacking at Tony.

To which Tony just grinned and sighed wistfully. “Don't remind me. I got to focus on this right now, but maybe bring that up again later?”

“Hey, lovebirds.” Bucky jerked his head over at Steve and Tony. “Bruce Banner, calling line one.”

“Apologize again for yesterday,” Steve told Bucky, before Tony could get a word out. Tony glared at him.

Bucky nodded his head impatiently as he silently transmitted the message and then listened to the answer. “Bruce says no problem. After having a night to think about it, he figures he might have been a little insensitive to our situation.” Bucky's eyebrows shut up into his hairline, and then he scoffed. “Bruce felt the need to add: even if we can't have any real emotions.”

Tony rolled his eyes and dropped back in his chair angrily. “Right. Because me being angry enough to storm out of here isn't a real emotional response.”

Bucky drummed his fingers against the terminal that his other arm was stuck in. “Bruce says it has the appearance of an emotional response, but there is no emotion actually governing it.”

“Who's he to tell us what we're feeling?!” Steve asked, incredulous.

Tony shook his head, holding out a hand to Steve. “No, but think about it from his point of view. You talk to a computer program, and you tell the computer something mean. Insult it. And it replies with indignation or anger or some sort of appropriate 'emotional' response. How are you supposed to know if the computer is actually feeling that way, or has just been programed to react that way? How do you know the computer isn't just responding with a set pattern of responses?”

Steve frowned, thinking about this for a moment. Bucky interrupted his thoughts by adding: “Bruce thinks it's funny to listen to a computer argue with itself.”

“Wasn't there something you said yesterday?” Steve asked Tony. “Something about how... we're not determined. We're...”

Tony grinned. “Probabilistic, yeah.” His smile said Steve was going get a reward for that display of recollection, later.

“Bruce says he's willing to assume we're genuine in our emotional reactions, for argument's sake.”

Tony snorted. “Tell him thanks for his generosity.”

“Uh, before he keeps talking, Bruce wants to know who the rest of you are,” Bucky told the room. “What are your names.”

“Tell him,” Steve encouraged Bucky. He turned to Tony, shrugging. “He probably already knows anyway.”

After a moment Bucky started... laughing, almost. A huffing noise that was as close to a laugh as Steve had heard from him in recent days. He looked at Tony and Steve. “He says you two are celebrities over there. Keep cropping up—like Alexander the Great, or Einstein. Steve Rogers and Tony Stark: he says he knows you two. In plenty of universes.”

Tony looked faintly green. “That's less reassuring than Bruce thinks it is,” he told Bucky.

Bucky replied: “He says there's a universe where you two are superheroes together. Another one where you're kings. One where you're President, Steve, and Tony's your first gentleman.”

Steve laughed, if only to stop himself from crying.

“So much for being unique,” Steve muttered.

“But you're the first ones to talk to him,” Bucky added. “We're the first ones, that he knows of, who made contact. He said he did some research last night, found out that some universes _have_ become aware before, but they were shut down. He says you were right.”

Steve swallowed thickly. Tony croaked: “See? Told him so.”

“He says he won't shut us down. He says we're too interesting. No one else has ever talked to them before—not that there are any records of. His boss, Loki—the guy who created all the simulations in the first place—isn't interested in simulations of simulations. But Bruce is.”

“Thank God we found him,” Steve mumbled, resting his head in hands. “Thank God it was Bruce on the other side, and not this Loki or someone else.”

“Bruce wants to know what our feelings are on living in a simulation. What are our plans going forward?” Bucky looked between Tony and Steve. “To be honest, I wanna hear the answer to this, too.”

Tony licked his lips, eyes calculating. He glanced over at Steve, who just shrugged. Bruce had helped them out this far. Bruce had promised to keep their secret. Bruce had kept them alive. But there was no telling how he might react to their next request. On the other hand: they'd never get it if they didn't ask. And they had nothing to lose. A simulated existence wasn't worth much more than a real non-existence. Not in Steve's mind, at least, and he knew not in Tony's, either.

“You got matter converters over there? Three-D printers?” Tony asked Bucky, scooting closer in his chair.

Bucky nodded. “He says yeah. He wants to know what you're getting at.”

Tony leaned forward, pressing his palms flat against the desk Bucky was sat at. “I want out,” Tony hissed.

Bucky went still for a moment, then shook his head. “Bruce says that's ridiculous.”

Tony beat at his chest, fingers clutching at the quantum computer embedded under his skin. “I have every second of myself saved onto a quantum computer. All of my DNA, all of my memories, a hundred percent accurate recollection of my brain state, updated every second of every day. I pump this data into the right printer, out comes me.”

Bucky paused again, eyes drifting off to the right as he listened. After a moment he shook his head. “Bruce says they've never copied consciousness by replicating brain states. He doesn't know if it can be done.” Bucky held up a hand before Tony could talk, listening. Then he continued: “He doesn't think it _can_ be done. He doesn't subscribe to Lewis' reductionist identity theory, or Putnam's modified reductionism. I don't know what that means.”

Tony shook his head. “I do. And he might be right. But I still want out. And this is our only shot.”

The monitor in front of Bucky flashed with a message from the Vision. _Doctor Banner is agitated_ , it warned.

Steve tensed. It was too much, too soon. They hadn't proven their personhood to Bruce's satisfaction, yet.

But then Bucky held out a hand, urging patience. “He just says he thinks it's ridiculous. You can't just print a body from a DNA blueprint and expect to be able to dump memories into the head like you do an old hard drive. It would never work.

“What is the resource allocation like over there?” Tony asked, seemingly changing the subject.

“He says it's 'post-surplus'. Do you know what that means?”

Tony nodded. “It means they've got all the resources they could ever want. They must be able to print food, electronics, anything as long as they've got raw matter. Ask him about population density. How many people live on earth and how many can it take?”

“He actually doesn't live on earth. He lives in a research colony, on a terraformed planet.” Bucky groaned and rubbed his head. “Listen, I don't know what half these words mean or if I'm getting them right.”

In front of Bucky, the Vision's screen flashed up the message: _You are doing quite well, Mr. Barnes. I would correct you if you had erred, but you have yet to_.

Bucky grunted. “Thanks, Vision.”

“Ask Bruce what the carrying capacity of his colony is. Or the planet.”

Bucky cracked his neck with one hand, then brought his fingers down to drum on the sleeve where his other arm disappeared into as he listened to Bruce's response. “He says they're colony is about a million strong, but the carrying capacity of the planet is the same as Earth's. Over ten billion. There's plenty of room, and the whole thing is terraformed. Just not colonized or with any infrastructure.”

“But they can print infrastructure if they need it,” Tony mused to himself.

“He says that what you're thinking, where you going with this: there's no way he could do it. Or get away with it. He says it's too many people, too big a project, even if he wanted to...”

Tony shook his head. “It is too big for him alone—he's right. Which is why we're coming over first.”

“Tony...” Steve started. It wasn't right. He wasn't about to abandon the people of this universe to their simulated existence, while he got to have his happily ever after with Tony in the real universe. That would make them _worse_ than the oppressors who occupied New Versailles before they took it.

But Tony shook his head, holding out his hand in a “wait” gesture to Steve. To Bucky, he said: “We'll come over first. The dozen or so of us who already know. We'll leave the Vision with instructions, and as our open line of communication. Then, we'll help Bruce out. Get it set up all over the world, hundreds, thousands of three-D printers in labs everywhere we can find them. We'll print _more_ three-D printers using the ones we already have. Exponential generation of three-D printers. We start with one, within ten prints we have one thousand twenty-four. Twenty prints, we have over a million. Assume each print takes a day. It won't, but just say it takes that long. Within a month we have a billion printers. We'd only have to print three people per printer. We could have everyone over in two months, max. Even if we don't print that many printers: say we print a hundred thousand printers, that's only thirty-thousand prints per printer. Once we have everyone over, we shut down the simulation. Solve the clone problem that way.”

Bucky shook his head. “He still says it's ridiculous, and impossible.”

“Ask him this, Bucky.” Tony crouched down, got close to Bucky to look him straight in the eyes. “Ask Bruce: Don't you want to see if you _can_?”

A long pause. Tony glanced over at Steve, biting his lower lip. Steve shook his head and shrugged. He didn't know. He didn't know how Bruce would react, or if their wild bet held any water whatsoever. A thousand variables were up in the air and could go wrong this second. Bruce could decide they were too uppity, and pull the plug right now. Their existence could end. It all hinged on a single man, who didn't even believe they were real, that they were feeling. But Tony knew scientists. Tony knew how they worked, how they thought. If anyone could get through to Bruce, could say all the right things to convince him to let them live, let them _try_ at living, it was Tony.

“He's back,” Bucky announced. Steve sucked in a breath. Next to him, Tony's hands were wrapped around his chair in a white-knuckled grip. Reaching out, Steve took ahold of one of Tony's hands and squeezed it tight. Tony looked forward at Bucky with grim determination.

“He says...” Bucky's face broke out into a grin. Relief washed over Steve, mixing with his gut-churning nerves. “He says he it would be a hell of a thing to see. He's willing to try.”

 


	17. The Rising Tide

 

The steaming-hot coffee sloshed to and fro inside its pitcher, threatening to spill over the edge. Steve slowed his steps, letting the liquid settle a bit before continuing on his walk down the steps. He shifted the tray to one hand as he reached the lab doors, using the other hand to push them open.

Inside, Steve was immediately assaulted by the blaring of terrible music. Steve sighed and made a detour to the stereo system over on the side of the lab, thumbing down the volume until it reached tolerable levels.

“Hey!”

Steve smiled banally as he made his way across the lab, tray held in both hands now. He set it down on Tony's workstation before pressing a kiss to his head. “That music is terrible and you're going to make yourself deaf if you play it at those volumes,” Steve cautioned.

“Doesn't matter anyway. I'll just rewrite my code so I'm not deaf on the other side,” Tony said with a shrug. He scooped up the pitcher of coffee from the tray with both hands and started to drink from it before Steve could stop him. He hissed and nearly dropped the pitcher back down, staring at it accusingly. “Hot,” he complained.

Steve groaned and reached for the two mugs on the tray. “And in a _pitcher_ ,” Steve pointed out. “You could at least pour it into a mug before you burned off your tongue.”

“But then I wouldn't be able to sucker you into kissing me better.” Tony flipped his goggles up with a grin and looked up at Steve expectantly.

Sighing, but not enough to hide his smile, Steve bent down to give Tony a kiss. It turned into more than he anticipated—it always did, with Tony—but when he pulled back he was only slightly out of breath, and with the taste of coffee on his lips.

“Welcome home, honey,” Tony greeted him, eyes crinkling in a smile.

Pulling up a chair, Steve groaned as he dropped down into it. “It's good to be home,” he said with a sigh.

Setting his tools aside, Tony pushed back from his workstation and turned in his chair to face Steve. He rubbed his hands up and down Steve's thighs, to which Steve replied by humming happily. It was welcome contact after a week apart. “Tough time on the road?” Tony asked, mostly teasing, but partly serious.

Steve shook his head, relaxing under Tony's touch. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Just a lot of train rides, and car rides, and one camel ride, which was awful. Do you know they bite? And spit?”

“I'd heard,” Tony replied. “Sorry.”

Steve shook his head. “It was alright. We got everyone in region fifteen set up, I think. Best as I could measure it, we got them.”

Tony grinned. “Well then, this calls for a celebration.”

Steve shook his head. “No it doesn't. What about your work?”

Tony held up a finger as he turned back to his workstation. He rummaged around for a moment until he found a tablet, then spun back around to Steve. Holding the tablet against his chest so Steve could see it, Tony looked down on it as he flicked through different screens of information. “My output is above our projected goals. That Jane Foster is a smart cookie. I could kiss Bruce for bringing her in on all this—she can do shit with quantum computers I could only _dream_ of. And to think all it took was letting her check out the Eridanus Supervoid in our universe. Nerd.”

Steve smiled affectionately as he listened to Tony talk. “You know, you keep saying stuff like that, and the closer we get to crossing over, the more I worry for the state of our relationship.”

Tony laughed and set the tablet to the side so he could squeeze at Steve's thighs again. “Yeah right. Something tells me neither Bruce nor Jane are anywhere near hot enough for you to worry. They're scientists, after all. Though I guess I disprove the ugly-scientist stereotype myself, being so handsome and all. Maybe you _should_ be worried-”

“Tony.” Steve scooted forward so he could cup Tony's face in his hands. “Shut up.” Then he kissed him to shut him up. Tony “mmphed” in token protest, but then he quickly melted into it, tongue pressing its way into Steve's mouth as they made up for time apart. After a minute of kissing Tony pushed Steve off him, only so he could stand up and climb into Steve's lap. Steve's chair rolled slowly across the lab floor, causing Steve to laugh into Tony's mouth.

“So you're ahead of schedule?” Steve asked in a break in the kissing.

Tony hummed against Steve's skin, nuzzling his face against Steve's neck. “Yeah. Plenty ahead. Should finish production on all of them by end of next month.” Tony lifted his head to look up at Steve. “What about your end? How's distribution going?”

Steve's hand came to rest on the back of Tony's head, stroking the too-long hairs there. He needed a haircut—he always neglected that sort of thing when Steve left him alone for too long, traveling around trying fulfill his half of the plan.

“We're on schedule. We have the manpower to pick up the pace, if you give us more computers to distribute. I'd have to stay out longer on each run, travel to more places each pass, but we can distribute the QCs as fast as you can build them.”

“I don't know about that. Dr. Foster gave me some great tips on how to speed up production. Gimme two, three weeks and I'll be outputting them faster than you can distribute them.”

“Not a chance,” Steve shook his head. “It's not like I have to hit every city myself. I can send Luke or Jennifer or someone else out in my place-”

“No.” Tony shook his head and looked up again. “You should go to every ghetto yourself. Make sure _everyone_ understands they _have_ to download themselves to the QCs. We're relying on your popularity for a hundred percent compliance rate, or as close as we could ever possibly get. Don't outsource that.”

Steve nodded. “Okay. I can still move faster than I am now, even without outsourcing. It'll mean more time away, but the faster we get this done-”

“-the faster we get out,” Tony finished for him.

For a long moment, the only sounds in the lab were the two men's soft breathing and the low hum of Tony's lab equipment. Then Steve shifted, running a hand down Tony's back. He bent his neck so he could kiss Tony's hair. “Maybe we shouldn't rush it,” he proposed.

Tony snorted. “Scared of what's on the other side?”

“Yeah.”

Tony breathed out, and Steve breathed in. They stayed there for a while, until Steve's legs started to grow numb from Tony's weight on top of him. Steve sighed and nudged at Tony. “We need to go see Bucky and the Vision,” Steve said. “Check in. Figure out where I'm going next, who's left.”

“How about this,” Tony mused. Leaning in, he started to punctate his thoughts with kisses along Steve's jaw. “We go to bed,” kiss, “have some amazing sex,” kiss, “take a nap,” kiss, “have some more _incredible_ sex,” kiss, “then maybe go find Bucky and go back to be boring and responsible.”

Steve squirmed in his chair, mouth falling open to Tony's against his steadfast will. Tony squirmed back, hips moving down against Steve's in a way that was distinctly unfair. For a long moment, Steve considered Tony's proposal. And kissed the ever-loving heck out of him.

“Okay,” he agreed. “Not nap. Or the incredible sex. Just the amazing sex.”

Tony pulled back from Steve's throat and frowned, mock-horrified. “You want to have amazing sex with me but not incredible sex? The honeymoon is over,” he moaned.

In one easy movement Steve stood, bringing Tony with him. Tony yelped and clung on, legs wrapping around Steve's waist, arms around his neck. When they were standing firmly, Tony leaned out and glared at Steve. “Show off,” he grumbled.

Steve raised his eyebrows at Tony, bouncing him slightly on his hips so he could get a better grip. “Do you _not_ want me to carry you back to our bed and ravish you?”

“No one says 'ravish'. You're an old man trapped in a hot, young body.”

Steve grinned. “This old man can take his hot, young body elsewhere-”

“Too much talking,” Tony grumbled, kissing Steve firmly. Steve grinned the whole way back to their bedroom. And carried Tony that whole way, too.

* * *

“Really? You couldn't put on a turtleneck?” Bucky complained. A finger darted out to flick at Steve's neck, stinging as it made contact with a particularly sensitive spot.

Steve winced and brought his hand up to his neck, frowning. “I didn't realize it was there,” he grumbled.

“Seriously, how old is your boyfriend? Nineteen? What kind of forty year old gives hickies?”

“Thirty,” Tony announced as he jogged into the room, late and with a cup of coffee in his hand.

Both Bucky and Steve leveled Tony with identical incredulous looks. Tony relented: “Okay, thirty-five.”

Bucky snorted and turned back to his workstation. “Thirty-five my ass...” he mumbled under his breath.

While Steve was minding his own business, waiting for Bucky to pull up the information they needed to review, Tony sidled up next to him on his tip-toes. Steve turned to look at him. “Yes?”

Catching sight of something, Tony grinned and dropped back down to his feet, apparently satisfied. “Nothing.”

Steve sighed and reached a hand up to his neck, covering the spot where he thought the hickey was. “Do you really have to do that every time?” he grumbled.

“Not _every_ time...” Tony grinned. Though he shrugged, not the least bit apologetic. “I like sucking on your neck. It's an oral fixation. And those yoga classes haven't gotten me to the point where I can suck your dick _while_ I'm balls-deep-”

“Okay! Vision's up!” Bucky shouted, interrupting Tony's not even close to quiet conversation. Tony shrugged and sipped at his coffee, unperturbed.

“What you got for us, Vision?” Tony asked.

“ _Good afternoon, Misters Stark and Rogers. I am glad to see you arrived safely home, Steve._ ”

Steve grinned up at the monitor where a crude red and green digital face smiled out at him. “Heya, Vision. Glad to be back, too. What's the story?”

“ _Seventy-six percent of precincts have received their shipments of quantum computers at one-hundred percent coverage for every citizen. You, Steve Rogers, have visited eighty-five percent of the seventy-six._ ”

“What percentage does that mean I've hit total, Vision?” Steve asked, not wanting to do the math.

“ _Sixty-four point six percent_.”

Tony spoke up: “With this new ramp-up in production I just had, I should hit three billion QCs outputted in two months. Mop-up in three.”

“ _My independent calculations support your estimation, Tony_.”

Tony snorted. “Well, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Steve took out the phone Tony had insisted Steve start carrying with him, for taking notes, among other things. “Do you have any information about how many people have started the download?”

“ _Nineteen percent of people who have QCs have downloaded themselves onto it_.”

Steve nodded, jotting that down. “Not unexpected. We figured no one would download themselves until the last day, when we told them to.”

Tony hummed. “I wish there was a way to incentivize them to upload themselves sooner. And more often. There's a non-negligible possible fail rate for these QCs. If everyone uploads themselves on the last day, there are going to be some uploads that fail. It's inevitable.”

“ _The possible fail rate of the QC uploads is point zero zero one six percent_ ,” Vision helpfully added.

Steve sighed and rocked back on his heels, one arm tucked into his chest, the other holding his phone out in front of him. Steve chewed on his bottom lip as he scanned the information. “That's...”

“Forty-nine thousand, six hundred people,” Tony muttered. “Approximately.”

Steve sighed and wiped his mouth with one hand. “Fifty-thousand people,” he said to himself. That's fifty-thousand people who had a chance of not being saved. Fifty-thousand people who would essentially die in the evacuation.

Bucky drummed his fingers on the console where he put his arm to talk with the other side. It was empty right now, communication lines closed for the moment. This was a problem on their side of things: not the real universe's problem.

“Is there any way we can make everyone test it beforehand?” Bucky asked.

Even as Steve thought his way through it, Tony shook his head. “What do you want to do? Tell them what it's actually for?”

Steve sighed. Yes. That was _exactly_ what he wanted to do: tell everyone what it was for, let them make their own decisions. Not all of this secrecy and lies about universal vaccinations and health care.

“We've had this conversation,” Tony explained, short on patience. “We can't tell people what we're doing. Bruce can barely keep us off Loki's radar as it is. He already had to bring in Jane and her boyfriend Thor to help with the set-up on the other side: the three-D printers, the raw matter, even helping me manufacture the QCs faster. The bigger this secret gets, the harder it is to keep. If we let everybody in the whole damn world know, it's going to raise some red flags over on the other side. Red flags Bruce won't be able to keep hidden.

“But if we don't tell them what the QCs really are, they might not use them. They might not upload themselves, because they think they don't need it. They say to themselves, 'I won't get sick', 'I don't need a vaccine,'” Bucky argued.

Tony snorted. “Why do you think we've been keeping the people busy? Building cities, setting up farms, placing them in jobs in factories, in shops, in kitchens? Because could you imagine what would happen on the large scale if people knew what we know? You saw what happened on our own individual level, how we all reacted. I disappeared down the neck of a bottle for a week and got damn near close to killing myself.” A shot of fear went through Steve at Tony's casual admission, like ice cubes down his spine. Tony plowed ahead. “Clint was ready to tear the place down. Sam completely denied it. Steve wanted to keep fighting, but Steve's our beautiful special snowflake exception to every rule. You know that just as much as I do.”

Steve glared at Tony. Bucky, traitor that he was, actually nodded along. Tony plowed ahead. “Can you imagine that on the large scale? Mass suicides. They'd happen, don't doubt it. Society would fall apart. Everyone would just _stop_ : stop working, stop trying, stop living. Two problems with that: number one, same one we always have, someone's going to notice that on the other side. Number two: we need the people to keep going. Up until we turn the lights out, we need people to keep working and producing and consuming. Getting the QCs out to everyone has already taken six months, and it's going to take at minimum another three months more—six months on the outside estimates. We need the people to keep society going for those six months.”

“You're using them,” Bucky pointed out. Steve winced, a visceral response to the accusation. Because it was an accusation he leveled at himself every night, after every speech he gave to the people about the health benefits of these QCs they wanted them to plug into.

“Only for their own good,” Tony argued back. “We're using them for a year so they won't be used for the rest of their lives. We're using them _just long enough_ to get them out of a system that treats them entirely as means to end.”

“I agree with Tony,” Steve cut in. Bucky turned to Steve like he had just betrayed him. Steve shook his head. “I hate it. I don't think we're on the moral high ground. But I truly believe this is the closest we can get.

“Look at me, Buck,” Steve asked him. Sighing, Bucky reluctantly turned from Tony to him. Steve kept his voice level, unwavering. “It's a rock and a hard place. And you know me. I don't do lying. I don't do using people. I don't believe in the 'it's for their own good' excuse. It's that kind of thinking that lead to the walls going up around New Versailles. As a rule, it's _not_ right to make decisions for others.

“But we have to,” Steve insisted. Bucky shook his head, prompting Steve to reach out and clasp him on the shoulder. “We have to fib, just this once, to everyone. To save them. I...” Steve hesitated, eyes darting between Bucky's. “I _have_ to save them.”

“Hey Vision: give us an estimate as to how many people would kill themselves, or not upload themselves to the QCs if they knew the reality of their situation?” Tony called out.

“ _Rough estimates indicate upwards of forty-four percent of the population would be noncompliant with the necessary quantum computer upload._ ”

Tony raised his eyebrows at Bucky. “Forty-four percent. Do you want a forty-four percent failure rate, or a point zero zero sixteen percent failure rate? Sure, they've got free choice in that forty-four percent. But I'm not willing to pick free choice over one point five billion people. And you know it wouldn't be free choice for all those people. Because some of them are kids, or dependents. Take the choice away from them long enough to get them out, and then let them have all the free choice they want. They can have so much they can choke on it. Because in here, they _don't_ have free choice. Not in actuality. So all we're doing is taking away the choice of people who don't even have it in the first place, so that they can have it in the very near future. Six months' time.”

“Still doesn't sit right with me,” Bucky replied.

Tony shrugged. “Doesn't sit right with me, either. Sits worse with Steve.” Tony threw his arm out toward Steve. “But we're doing it. Because it's more right than anything else. And in the end, it'll be the right thing.”

The _drum, drum, drum_ of Bucky's fingers on the console was loud in the lab. The Vision's face waited patiently for them on his monitor, smiling placidly in red and green. After a moment Bucky sighed, then shook his head. “Alright. I know. I know all this bullshit. I still don't like it.”

“Don't have to like it,” Steve told him. “Just gotta get it done.”

“When are you heading out next?” Bucky asked.

Steve looked over at Tony, holding a silent conversation in looks and eyebrow twitches, micro expressions. After a moment Steve nodded and turned back to Bucky. “Couple days. Just long enough to pack up another one of Tony's orders and bring it with me. I think they like it better when I'm the one handing it out to them.”

“Wonder why.” Bucky's sarcasm was palpable.

“I'm coming with you,” Tony announced. Steve raised his eyebrows over at Tony, who returned the look. “The next ten million I'm manufacturing is already set up and ready to go, hundred percent automated. I have the time to spare, and I'd rather spend it with you.” Steve gaped, to which Tony just smiled and shrugged. “It's true. Plus, I'd like to see you in action, selling my product to the masses. We're a team: we might as well spend the time together like one.”

* * *

“It's beautiful country, isn't it?” Tony asked, stepping up to join Steve at the window.

Steve nodded, watching the plains rush by outside the train at two hundred miles an hour. The sky was a deep blue, not a cloud to be seen for the length of it. It was big country, out there: room to breathe, room to roam. Steve thought he would have liked to spend some time out here. If it had been real. If there hadn't been another world waiting for him, just out of reach.

“Too bad it's not real,” Tony mused, echoing Steve's thoughts.

“What do you think the real universe is like?” Steve asked. He turned away from the window, shifting his focus to Tony. Tony, who was real: maybe not in flesh, but in mind, feeling, in memory. Tony, who would be the same when they made their journey over.

Tony considered the question seriously, like he did from time to time. It always surprised Steve, even though it never should, when Tony took something seriously.

“I don't know,” Tony admitted. “I keep thinking of Bruce as this person, as this human being with pink or brown or yellow skin, with two arms and two legs and two eyes and two ears, with a heart and stomach and pancreas and colon. But there's no way of knowing, is there? We're one simulation of trillions. By chance we evolved to be homo sapiens, and became the dominant species on Earth. Universe prime might have a completely different history. Lizards could have been the dominant life: maybe the asteroid didn't kill them, or maybe something set off global warming instead of an ice age, killing off the mammals and letting the reptiles thrive. For every minor difference we could ever imagine in the history of the cosmos, there's a different possible simulation for it. There's no way to know which of those ways universe prime turned out.”

Tony paused for a moment, staring down into his tumbler as he swirled his drink in it. “I know a few things. I know that the planet we'll be landing on isn't Earth. But I know there _was_ an Earth—still is. I know that whatever Bruce is, he breathes oxygen and drinks water. Otherwise he would have warned us that our biological make-up was too different to exist on the terraformed lab planet he lives on.”

Tony squinted out the window, up at the sky. “I don't know what color the sky will be. It could be blue, it could be red or purple or green. It could have rings around its equator, filling it. It could have ten moons or none. It could have a red giant or a blue dwarf hanging in it during the day. But there's one thing I know with a hundred percent certainty.”

“What?”

“You'll be there, with me. And you'll be you: Steve Rogers. Best man I ever knew.”

Steve flushed and dropped his gaze. “Stop.”

Tony lifted his hand, thumb and forefinger coming up to take gentle hold of Steve's chin. He tugged until Steve raised his gaze reluctantly, met Tony's eyes. There was nothing but sincerity there. “Hey, it's corny, but it's true. And you know I only stoop to saying the corny stuff if it's the truth. Wouldn't be caught dead otherwise.”

“Sure,” Steve chuckled. “Right.” He quieted Tony's protests with a kiss. He also thanked Tony with that kiss, lips moving softly over Tony's own in a silent litany of _thank you, thank you. I love you_.

A subtle shift in pressure caused Tony to stumble against Steve, feet sliding for a second before he regained his balance. Steve lifted his head to look out the window at the country growing slowly more distinct outside. “We're slowing down,” he informed Tony needlessly.

“You need to prepare or something? Want me to fuck off for a while?”

Steve shook his head, arm that was wrapped around Tony squeezing him tighter to his chest. “No. I've done this so many times.” Cocking his head down, Steve smiled softly. “Have you been watching my speeches?”

Tony slid his eyes away, smile tugging involuntarily at his lips. “Nah. What do you think: I'm fanboying over you from a distance, while you're away? I got the real deal in my bed more nights than not. Why'd I watch you make the same speech a million times?”

Assessing Tony through narrowed eyes, Steve grinned. “You've watched me.”

“Shhh,” Tony hushed Steve, mock-terrified. “Don't spread it around. Wouldn't want to ruin my bad reputation.”

The train slowed even more, the scenery closer to the window growing clearer by the second. Telephone poles and wires appeared in their sight, then fences, they long stalks of corn and wheat growing in the fields. A hare ran into the field, startled by the engine of the train and the quiet hum of displaced air between train car and track.

Steve sighed and released Tony from his arms. Looking down at himself, Steve straightened out his pressed white shirt and blue coat. He ran a hand through his hair, ducking to look at his reflection in the window of the train, trying to make sure he was camera-ready. He didn't think he'd ever get used to this public adoration and attention.

“You look good,” Tony promised him.

Turning away from the window, Steve shot Tony a lopsided smile. “Sure about that?”

Tony rolled his eyes and reached up to brush at Steve's hair, pushing a few loose strands neatly into the rest. “You always look good. I could tell you that you looked good with my eyes closed. But yes: you look camera-ready. No stress.”

Standing up on his toes, Tony dropped a quick kiss to Steve's lips just as the train was slowing to a full stop. “Go get them, tiger,” Tony said with a wink.

Steve stepped off the train to the roar of a crowd. He smiled and waved, squinting in the bright sun as his eyes adjusted from the lower light of the train car. A podium was set up at the train station, waiting for him at the bottom of the steps. The crowd was bunched around it, the only clear ground visible immediately behind the podium, waiting for Steve to fill it.

Steve made his way down to the podium, crowd reaching out to touch him, to cheer him on, to thank him and tell him how beloved he was. Steve accepted it all would with grace, shaking hands, smiling, greeting people and returning their enthusiasm right back to them. Steve got through it by reminding himself it wasn't fake. Not at the base. He _was_ saving the people. He just hadn't finished yet. They thought he was a hero for bringing the walls of New Versailles down, for setting up a fair and just government in its stead. Instead, he had discovered the truth behind the walls, and was still working at freeing them from this new, invisible yolk around all their necks. They thought he was a hero for giving them jobs to work at, for handing back the means of production to the people, for giving them this miracle cure for all their ails in the form of QCs he and Tony were distributing to the people. Instead, he was giving them freedom, free choice, free will.

The noise of the crowd reached a crescendo as Steve stepped behind the podium. The young woman who ran this ghetto, Isabel, shook Steve's hand as she stepped aside.

“It's a pleasure having you come out here,” Isabel gushed.

Steve gave her a quick, crooked smile. “Of course. I want to make sure I reach as many people in person as I can. How's the crowd size?”

Isabel beamed. Her accent was sweet and corn-fed, the sort of honest accent that Steve knew made her well-loved by her people out here. “Great! Early estimates have the crowd up at two million. Everyone from three states is here! Anyone who couldn't make it is watching it on their TVs or listening to it on their radios, we made sure of that.”

Looking out on the crowd, Steve tried to make an estimate on the size by comparing it to crowds he'd spoken to in the past. It was difficult with numbers this big, population sizes so massive. But from what he could tell, Isabel's assessment of the turn-out was accurate. Good. The more people he reached was better.

Stepping behind the podium, Steve raised his hands. The crowd cheered louder, noise like a hurricane beating against his chest. He waited, hands raised, until the noise broke. That's when he raised his voice and said: “Good morning!”

The people cheered again. They liked that. That's what he'd said the morning they'd brought the walls down. It had been stupid and born of nerves at the time. Now it had become some sort of ad hoc rallying cry.

When there was another break in the shouting, spoke again. “Good morning. It was a long journey to get here, but here I am. And here you are. I can't tell you how proud it makes me to see all of you, free and working to build a better world. It won't be easy. It won't happen overnight. But you're smart people: you know that. You know that it's a long road ahead of us, and yet: look at what you've done! Look at how _far_ you've come in a matter of months. I've traveled all over this world, and every single city I visit, I see you working miracles. I see you at work; I see you producing in factories; I see you tilling the fields; I see your children getting an education.”

Steve paused here to let the crowd cheer. They followed the same pattern, ghetto to ghetto. The specifics may change, minor words differ, but the beat was the same. The rhythm was the same. Steve had learned the rhythm by now.

Now was the hard sell. Steve smiled big, flashing that thousand-watt, as Tony called it. “But it hasn't just been you hard at work. We've been working, too. In Old Versailles,” the nickname that had started to stick to New Versailles now that the walls were down. “We've been working on health care for you. Every one of you. And with the help of our brightest minds like Tony Stark, Wanda Maximoff, and Sue Storm, we've come up with something that should help improve every. Single. Life.”

Steve took a moment to look around as he waited for the cheering to die down. His eyes scanned the crowd, looking for familiar faces. He spotted Tony, standing over by the train, arms hanging over the railing on the raised walkway. When Tony caught him looking, he gave Steve a thumbs up. Steve nodded and turned back to the crowd.

“What these good men and women have come up with is essentially a vaccine. But to call it that is to oversimplify things. These devices that we brought on the train with us today are QCs. They are going to fix your every ail. They will vaccinate you against every disease we know. Not only that, but if you have a bad heart, the QC will fix it. If you have cancer, the QC will wipe it out. Then, it will make sure you never _get_ cancer. If you are asthmatic, like I was as a boy, it will strengthen your lungs and make you able to breathe. All without a single side effect to you.

“We want you to work. We want you to produce. We want you in the factories, churning out new electronics. We want you in the fields, feeding us. We want your children in school, learning everything we can teach them. What we don't want is for you to have to worry about your health. About your well-being or your children's well-being. So we worried about it for you. And we came up with the solution: the QC.”

Reaching into his coat pocket, Steve pulled out a little device, no bigger than a pocket watch. He lifted it up to the crowd, letting them take a good long look at it. The crowd cheered for the device, like he knew they would. Everyone already knew about the QCs, and what they would do. Steve had made this speech in dozens, if not approaching hundreds, of ghettos already, and Sam's Redwing network made sure that anyone who wanted to watch Steve's speech could every time he made it. Word had spread. Steve was doing his job well.

“Every single one of you will receive a QC. We're producing them as fast as we can, but it takes a while to make three billion of anything, let alone a piece of technology this advanced.” Steve laughed and the crowd joined him. Steve smiled big. “There's no doubling up for family members. Please, be patient, and we will get ever one of you your own QC. Everyone here today, and every one of your loved ones that you had to leave at home for whatever reason, will receive a QC. Please, keep them safe, and wait for Vaccination Day. The QCs will not be active until Vaccination Day.

“If you are a couple capable of reproduction, we will send you two spare QCs in case that you have children before the Vaccination Day six months from now. In the unlikely event that you have triplets or more simultaneous children before that time, you have two options. Find a neighbor with an extra QC and use that for your third child born since these were handed out. Or, contact us. We will do everything within our power to get you a QC for your additional child before the Vaccination Day.”

“ _What about women who are pregnant at the time of the back-up?” Steve worried at his lower lip, sprawled out on his bed as Tony fiddled with a tablet up at the headboard. “We can't back-up a fetus, can we?”_

“ _It'll upload with the mother,” Tony told him without looking up from his tablet._

_Rolling onto his side, Steve twisted his body so he could look back at Tony. “Really?”_

_Tony nodded. “At that point it's still a part of the mother's body. Like a kidney. It'll encode with her just the same as her brain states encode and her kidneys encode. She print out the other end exactly as pregnant as she uploaded herself to her QC.”_

Steve smiled blandly out to the crowd as they cheered. “We have a long road ahead of us. But I am so proud of how far we've already come. One day, years from now, your children and your grandchildren will learn in their schools about the Dark Ages you lived through. They will hear about a time where babies died in their cribs. They will hear about a time when men died of a heart attack at age forty-five. They will hear about a time when women died of breast cancer at twenty. When children their own age died of leukemia at ages four, six, ten. And they will turn to you, unable to imagine such a terrible world. Because of what we do now, because of what we will achieve in the next six months, a world of such suffering will be incomprehensible to our children. And it is all thanks to you. So thank you.” Steve touched the QC to his chest in clenched fist. “From the bottom of my heart: thank you. I'm proud of you.”

The roar of the crowd grew so intense that Steve winced as he stepped back from the podium. He turned to Isabel and shook her hand, then let her pull him into an enthusiastic hug. “They're all yours,” he shouted into her ear so she could hear. He dropped a kiss to her cheek as he pulled back. Isabel beamed under his attention.

Steve returned to the podium for a moment so he could say to the crowd: “Your mayor Isabel is in charge of the distribution of the QCs. I'm leaving you in her capable heads. Thank you all, again. None of this would have been possible without your sacrifices and hard work.”

Steve stepped down from the podium, pushing his way through the crowd back towards the train. He let the density of the crowd determine the pace of his steps, in no great rush to get back to the train. He had three more of these stops today, but each stop factored in plenty of time for the throngs of people who wanted to see him, to touch him, to bask in his near-sainthood for just one minute more.

Steve reached the train feeling dirtier than when he had stepped off it. Not from the crowd—the crowd was full of good, kind-hearted people, who just wanted to live their lives and raise their children. He didn't feel dirty because of them. If anything, they were the only thing keeping Steve some semblance of clean. No, he felt dirty because of the lies that had just fallen from his tongue. Easier every time, it seemed, they fell. He felt dirty because he was pulling the biggest con the world had ever seen. Bigger than what those kings of New Versailles had pulled on the people for centuries. Because what he was doing, what Tony and Wanda and Sue were all doing, was tricking the people into saving themselves. Not keeping them down. Not keeping things secret. But tricking them into the truth. Tricking them into freedom.

The means were bad, and there was no guarantee the end would be good. But the end would real. A real bad thing had to be greater than a good fake thing. That was the bet Steve was making with everyone's lives. That was the gamble he was taking.

“You did great,” Tony murmured into Steve's ear. He wrapped an arm around Steve as they boarded the train together.

Steve wasn't sure if he should thank Tony for the compliment, or make him take it back.

 


	18. Battle Born

 

The muscles in Bucky's arm flexed as he listened to Bruce for the last time. “He says: Happy Immigration Day, Universe Twelve Eighteen.”

Tony threw back a flute of champagne, then grabbed the bottle and refilled it. “We're calling it Immigration Day, now? I thought it was Vaccination Day.”

“Keep up,” Bobbi snorted. “Vaccination Day for them, Immigration Day for us.”

Clint perked up from where he was sitting on one of the lab tables. “Wait, Immigration Day? I thought we were calling it Fucking _Out_ Day.”

“Only you are calling it that,” Jessica Drew pointed out. Carol snorted, and the two women high-fived.

Clint rolled his prosthetic eyes in his head, blue glow dim in the bright lights of the lab.

Steve sucked in a breath and clasped a hand to Sam's shoulder. “You ready for this?” he asked his friend.

Sam laughed and threw back his flute of champagne, then grabbed the bottle out of Stark's hand as he walked past. “You kidding me? Could anyone ever answer that question with a 'yes'?” Sam poured himself another glass of champagne. The second he was done pouring, Tony swooped back and picked the bottle off. He poured himself another drink, at which point Steve took the bottle away from the both of them. Tony pouted over at him. Steve raised his eyebrows.

“Do you really want to be drunk for this?”

Tony shrugged. “I won't be drunk on the other side.”

Steve frowned. “Won't you be?”

Tony threw back his third flute of champagne and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “I honestly have no idea, gorgeous.”

Steve flushed. “Don't-”

“Shh.” Tony hushed him with a kiss. Then he spun around and pointed his champagne glass at Bucky. “How are things going on their end?” Tony asked.

“Bruce says they're ready to go. Three-D printers at one hundred percent. Thor, Jane, Stephen, Hank, and Jan are in the five locations, ready for the meet-and-greet. Bruce is in the sixth location, ready to flip the main switch.”

Steve turned to the monitor where the Vision was peering helpfully out at them. “Vision, what are our numbers for the QCs?”

“QC distribution at ninety-nine percent,” Vision confirmed. Steve nodded. It was as close as they could ever get. He tried not to think about one percent of three point one billion was.

“Media saturation?” Steve asked.

“Best estimates indicate ninety-nine percent of the population has seen your message, Steve,” Vision relayed.

Steve nodded. “Alright. You got the message ready for as soon as Bruce tells you we succeeded?”

The Vision's red and green head nodded on the monitor. “Your prerecorded message is queued and waiting for the affirmative signal from Dr. Banner.”

Taking a step closer to the monitor, Steve turned his head up to the camera they had installed just above the Vision's monitor, where he could keep an eye on the room. Looking into the camera seriously, Steve said: “You're ready to back yourself up too, right? You got your body ready and everything?”

“Indeed, Steve. I am ready to transition as soon as the last person has been downloaded to universe prime.”

Steve nodded at Vision. “Good. We're not leaving you behind. You're just as conscious as the rest of us, and deserve to get out just as much as any one walking around out there right now.”

“Thank you, Steve. I have completed all the necessary preparations for my transition.”

Taking a breath, Steve turned back to the rest of the room, eyes moving over everyone. They alighted on three people, and one tiny person, towards the back of the room. He handed the champagne bottle he was carrying off to Rhodey—he could be trusted to keep it away from Tony. And if he didn't, Pepper or Happy, who were standing on either side of Rhodey, would make sure of it.

Coming to a stop in front of the group in the back, Steve shook Luke, Jessica Jones, and Danny's hands in turn. Then he lifted Dani up and tossed her in the air, smiling as she shrieked and giggled, curly black hair bouncing in her pigtails. Steve kept her on his hip as he turned to her parents.

“You three still sure you're okay with staying behind?”

Jessica laughed. “Are you kidding? It's a relief. Let you childless people take all the risk. If you've gone collectively insane-”

Luke cut in: “Which, for the record: jury's still out on that one.”

“ _You_ can end up dead or trapped in a hellish computer program world instead of us!” Jessica finished brightly.

Steve laughed, only a touch of hysteria coming through. He was pretty proud of that. “Yeah, great. Thanks for that visual.” He rubbed the back of his neck.

“Hell!” Dani shouted in Steve's ear, giggling.

Jessica hushed Dani. “No, sweetie. Bad word. Don't say that word.”

Dani giggled coyly, chubby cheeks big as a chipmunk's. “ _Hell_ ,” she whispered as loud as she could.

Jessica laughed and scooped Dani up out of Steve's arms. She rubbed her nose against Dani's making the toddler giggle again. “No, bad Dani! Naughty word! Don't say bad word or mommy will have to _get you_.” On the last word Jessica bit down on Dani's arm, making “Ohm nom nom nom!” noises. Dani screeched and giggled, squirming away from mommy's attack. Steve sighed as he looked on at the happy family.

“You four get over as soon as you know it works,” Steve ordered them. “Because I think I'm going to need a hug, and Dani gives the best hugs. Isn't that right?”

Dani nodded solemnly, then held out her arms for a hug. Steve smiled and scooped her up one last time, hugging her close. “You save one of these hugs for me, okay?” Steve whispered into her hair. “And you give me one after we take our trip.”

“Trip!” Dani shouted. Then she grinned wickedly as Steve passed her back to her mother. “ _Hell trip_ ,” she whispered. Jessica bit her on the arm for that, making her giggle and shriek.

“Good luck,” Danny wished him. He held out his fist, which Steve bumped gingerly, mindful of his prosthetic enhancements. It was like bumping fists with a steel wall.

“Keep Tony out of trouble,” Luke made Steve promise. “I don't want to evacuate my family to another universe just to find out Tony Stark has give us all a bad reputation in the ten minutes before we showed up.”

“I'll do my best,” Steve promised with a laugh. He and Luke shook hands warmly. Then Steve turned from them and looked around the rest of the room.

There wasn't much else he could do. Tony had finally given up on pounding back the champagne—thanks probably to Pepper, Rhodey, and Happy keeping the champagne bottle away from him—and was shuffling around, running cables from one console to the other. Bucky was drumming his fingers against the terminal where his other arm was hooked in. Natasha was beside him, expression stoic as her eyes scanned the room. Clint, Bobbi, and Daisy had a deck of cards, taking turns shuffling it nervously. Carol was holding Wanda, whispering something in her ear, while Pietro and Jessica stuck close to the pair. Jennifer and Sam were joking with each other, laughter forced but keeping it up, with nothing else to do to kill the time. Sue and Reed were off to the side with their children: a little blonde girl named Valerie, and their eldest, a boy named Franklin. Valerie was holding a stuffed tortoise in her arms. Steve made a note to try and find her a stuffed tortoise when they got to the other side. If there was such thing as stuffed animals, or tortoises, on the other side.

Slowly Steve walked through the room, watching each person, taking them in. Remembering them. Committing them to memory. This moment would be his last memories of the simulation, if what they were planning worked. If it didn't... well. They'd be his last memories in an entirely different manner of speaking.

When he reached the front of the room, he placed a hand on Bucky's shoulder—the one he had strapped into the console. Bucky reached up with his free hand and covered Steve's with his own. The looked at each other for a long moment.

“I'm glad you didn't die,” Steve finally said.

Bucky broke down laughing, knocking his head against the terminal. He looked up at Steve with tears in his eyes. “ _What_?!”

Steve started laughing too, unable to help himself. He wiped at his eyes with one hand, the other gripping tight at Bucky's shoulder. “I'm sorry. It's all I can think. I'm glad you didn't die a year and a half before we escaped the simulation. I just keep thinking it.”

“Well, what can I say? I'm glad I'm not dead, too,” Bucky replied.

They embraced awkwardly, around Bucky's arm strapped into the console. Then Steve straightened and put his hands on his hips, surveying the room one last time. “Alright, tell Bruce we'll do our QC uploads in one minute,” he told Bucky. To Tony, who was rushing past with an armful of cables, he called out: “You ready?”

Tony nodded, flapping a hand beneath the bundle. “Will be. Thirty seconds. Let me just...” Tony scurried across the room and dropped the cables on the floor. He plugged two things in the wall, then picked up a different bundle of wires.

“You know what the first thing I'm gonna do? When we get over to the other side?” Tony asked Steve with a smile. The muscles in his arms were flexing as he wrapped the cable, hurrying to set up the connections they'd need.

Steve glanced over at Tony, nervous smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “What?”

Tony grinned and leaned in. “Kiss you square on the mouth.”

He did just that, pressing his lips to Steve's even through Steve's grin. Steve kissed him back, then nudged him away. “Sounds like a sound plan,” he agreed.

“Gotta prove to myself we're in the real world. Only thing to do that'll be to knock my socks off with a kiss.”

“High standard for a kiss,” Steve commented as Tony plugged the last few cables into the console Bucky was sitting at.

With a flourish Tony plugged in the last cable and turned to wink at Steve. “I have the fullest confidence in you.”

“That's one minute,” Bucky called out.

Steve nodded. “Okay then. Here we go.” Turning to the room at large, Steve pulled the pocketwatch-sized QC out of his coat pocket. He held it up and cleared his throat. “Alright, everyone. It's time. If you're coming over now, upload yourself to your QC.” Everyone in the room save Danny, Luke, Jessica, and Dani pulled out their QCs from wherever they had been hiding them.

Taking a breath, Steve depressed the button in the center of his QC. It started glowing blue and clicked open, forming a little claw shape. Squeezing his eyes shut, Steve pressed the device to his left ear. There was a small pinch—that would be the local anesthetic. Then nothing, just some loud humming as it went to work. Steve knew it was taking a complete brain scan and a DNA sample. The process would take one minute.

When the minute was up the QC detached itself with a soft whir, dropping into Steve's waiting palm. He opened his eyes to see everyone else's QCs dropping from their ears. Tony was waiting, drumming his fingers over the QC in his chest. Similarly, Bucky was tapping his fingers on the terminal. With their QCs already built into their bodies, neither men needed the ones Tony had manufactured.

“Okay.” Tony and Steve looked at each other. Steve clutched his QC in his hand.

“If you've got anything to tell me, now's the time,” Steve pointed out. “I won't remember it.”

Tony smiled crookedly. He shrugged. “The only thing I can think to say is 'I love you'. But you already know that. And you'll know it after we immigrate.”

“I love you, too,” Steve said. Needlessly, judging by the way Tony just kept smiling crookedly at him, expression not even twitching.

Steve turned to Bucky. “Well?”

Bucky nodded. “Bruce is ready to go. Load them up.”

Steve and Tony collected the QCs together, then plugged each into the cables Tony had hooked up. One cable went into Bucky's terminal, where his arm was plugged in. The last cable went into Tony's chest, into an outlet he had surgically added over his built-in QC. He nodded over at Steve, and Steve nodded back. It was now or never.

“Alright, Vision.” Steve nodded at the bodiless face watching him from the monitor. “It's on you. As soon as we tell you it worked: have everyone save themselves. And bring them over. Jessica, Danny, Luke. Dani: we'll see you soon.”

Steve turned to Tony, nodded at him. “I'll see you on the other side.”

Tony winked, hit a button on the console. “We're already there.”

 

 


	19. Epilogue

 

“So what do you call this again?”

“Shawarma.”

“Huh. Shawarma. Never had that in our universe. Did we?”

Steve shrugged. “Not that I ever ate. What is it, exactly?”

Bruce dabbed a napkin at the corners of his mouth and finished swallowing before answering. “Spiced lamb,” he explained. “Spit-roasted, put into a wrap.”

Tony looked over at Steve. “You like it?”

Steve considered this for a long moment, turning the meat over his mouth, tasting the flavor, feeling the texture. Finally he nodded. “Yeah. It's good.”

Tony snorted. “You like everything we've tried. Back me up on this, Sam. Amirite? Steve hasn't disliked a single thing.”

Steve just grinned and shrugged. “It's all real,” he explained simply. “Even if it's bad, it's better than the best thing in the simulation. It's all real.”

 


End file.
